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Punitive damages are awarded as
punishment for conduct committed with reckless disregard
for safety or conduct that constitutes insurance bad
faith.
Here are three recent cases that underscore
our competence in the area of Punitive Damages and Insurance
Bad Faith; Quinnones v. Federal Armored Express,
Zelder & Felder v. Unnamed Insurance Co. and
Winkler v. Unnamed Insurance Co.
In the first case
of punitive damages, Quinnones v. Federal Armored
Express, our client, Isidro Quinnones
was on his way to work one morning when his vehicle was
struck by an armored truck. The truck flipped up in the
air landing on his car, trapping him inside. It was uncovered
during litigation that the driver of the armored vehicle
did not have a commercial truck drivers license, and practical
driving training had not been provided by Federal Armored
Express. FAE was aware that their accident record was
in excess of five hundred per year... and they still put
an unlicensed, untrained, unsupervised driver on the roadway
in darkness and rain conditions. Our client sustained
severe brain damage and paralysis, requiring twenty-four
hour a day care. Ed Steinbrecher settled this case just
before trial for $12,000,000, one of the largest
personal injury settlements in California.
In
the second insurance bad faith lawsuit,
Zelder & Felder v. Unnamed
Insurance Co., Marilyn Felder and Mary Zelder
suffered injuries when their vehicle was struck by another
driver who was at fault and uninsured. After their insurance
company learned who the arbitrator was for the case,
they withdrew all offers of settlement and then received
a very favorable award at the arbitration. Because the
result was not credible, this case was appealed to the
Court of Appeals which reversed the arbitrator's award.
An insurance
bad faith lawsuit was then
filed against the insurance company for taking unfair
advantage of its insureds by manipulating the settlement
offers based on inside information about the original
arbitrator. Our clients received a settlement of $2,500,000.
The third case, Winkler v. Unnamed
Insurance Co., is a combination of insurance
bad faith and punitive
damages. Our client, Roland Winkler suffered spinal
cord injury and paralysis as a result of an auto accident
in which he was a passenger, one of the insurance companies
involved refused to pay its $300,000 policy, wrongly
reforming the insurance policy after the accident. Their
refusal to pay was one of the major reasons that Ed
Steinbrecher took the case to a jury trial resulting
in a $4,300,000 verdict, and an additional settlement
of $6,000,000 for bad faith.
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