Life Insurance

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Over the last couple of years numerous class actions have been filed against life insurance companies alleging that the companies should be required to perform searches of the Social Security Death Master File database to ascertain whether death benefits may be due that have not been claimed by beneficiaries.  This has also been the focus…

Life insurance class actions I have been following include the multi-district litigation (MDL) against Prudential Life Insurance Company of America pending in federal district court in Massachusetts.  This case involves the payment of life insurance benefits under servicemembers’ and veterans’ group life insurance programs that are operated by Prudential and subsidized by the federal government. …

A recent decision on class certification in a case involving ratemaking for universal life insurance policies illustrates where the rubber is meeting the road in insurance class actions post-Wal-Mart.  It also reminds class action lawyers of the importance of considering carefully whether the putative class members would actually want the relief being sought…

Preliminary injunctions in insurance class actions are relatively rare, which is why the recent decision granting such an injunction in Yue v. Conseco Life Ins. Co., 2012 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 46565 (C.D. Cal. Apr. 2, 2012), caught my attention.  The case involves life insurance products sold by Conseco Life that apparently became a particularly…

Last week I noted that there have been a relatively large number of recent opinions in insurance class actions, and provided updates on a number of significant recent P&C decisions.  Now I’ll focus on significant recent life insurance cases.  The first involves the Social Security Death Master File, a hotbed of recent regulatory and class…

Those readers who have followed my blog regularly will be familiar with my prior posts regarding class actions involving life insurers’ use of “retained asset” or “checkbook” accounts.  Under this arrangement, the insurer pays the proceeds of a life insurance policy to a beneficiary by providing a checkbook for an interest-bearing account from which the…

As I’ve noted in prior posts regarding the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in AT&T Mobility, LLC v. Concepcion (see, for example, my August 22, 2011 post), the insurance industry is in a somewhat unique position with respect to the use of arbitration clauses as a mechanism of avoiding class action exposure.  One reason for…