Overview
After Hurricane Hanna struck the Rio Grande Valley in the summer of 2020, we were retained by nine separate school districts that had collectively paid $5 million in premiums to insure $3 billion in property value. When we were retained, the various insurers for these school districts had paid out about 0.1% of the total insured values.
Results
Working alongside the general counsel for the various districts, we have, on average, improved those payouts by over 2300% more than the original insurance payments. As of October 2024, with most of the matters resolved, we have turned $3.7 million in voluntary insurance payments into $80 million in litigated recoveries.
Representing government entities in large catastrophe litigation can be a heavy lift. To achieve these results, we spent millions of dollars and thousands of hours, working with some of the foremost experts in order to accurately quantify the damages and prove causation. Our discovery efforts and forensic technology uncovered smoking-gun documents in multiple cases in which the insurers had internally evaluated the insured damages at many multiples of what they had admitted, but concealed this evidence during the claims process and in discovery. For example, the one insurer tried to get away with a $120,000 payment when its internal documentation recognized nearly $25 million in damages. We filed motions for summary judgment seeking to force interim payments, and we aggressively and successfully pressed courts and arbitration tribunals to require the insurers to produce damaging internal documents. We overcame multiple challenges to our damage model, and rebutted arguments about insurance policy exclusions.