Title Insurance

Subscribe to Title Insurance via RSS

Title insurers have been hit with a wave of putative class action lawsuits alleging that they improperly failed to provide discounts on premiums for title policies issued in connection with a refinancing.  (For more on this, see the Title Insurance page of this blog.)  Although some classes have been certified on this issue, the federal…

Numerous class actions have been filed against title insurance companies claiming that they failed to properly discount rates when policies were reissued, typically in connection with refinancing of properties.  (For more on this, see, for example, my August 2, 2012 post.)  Contrary to some prior decisions in federal courts, the Kentucky Court of Appeals…

In a title insurance class action, the Fifth Circuit recently illustrated one method of applying the Supreme Court’s decision in Wal-Mart v. Dukes:  Analyze separately each question that the named plaintiffs propose as a  common question of law or fact.  Determine whether it is actually a proper question that a judge would decide as…

Back in May of 2011, I wrote a blog post about a denial of class certification by the Western District of Washington in Boucher v. First American Title Insurance Company.  The court denied certification but allowed the plaintiffs to conduct discovery and later file a renewed motion for class certification.  The recent decision on…

Several years ago, legal commentators wrote extensively about the U.S. Supreme Court’s decisions in Ashcroft v. Iqbal, 556 U.S. 662 (2009) and Bell Atlantic Corp. v. Twombly, 550 U.S. 544 (2007), which revised the standard for a motion to dismiss under Fed. R. Civ. P. 12(b)(6).  Commentators have debated the extent to which…

The filed rate doctrine is a general principle that a suit cannot be brought against an insurance company, or other company that is subject to rate regulation (such as a utility) challenging the appropriateness of rates that were filed with a regulatory agency.  The rationale for this doctrine is essentially that ratemaking is properly within…

A recent Fourth Circuit opinion highlights the importance of exploring the possibility that plaintiffs in a class action may have an administrative remedy in the state insurance department, which they may have to exhaust before suit.

Mitchell-Tracey v. United General Title Insurance Company, 2011 U.S. App. LEXIS 15952 (4th Cir. Aug. 2, 2011) was…

I recently came across the first class certification ruling I’ve seen in an insurance case since the Supreme Court decided Wal-Mart (see my prior blog post).  The court strongly applied the new standard for commonality and found a lack of commonality, even though the same judge had previously found most of the class certification…

Law360 alerted me to one of the first significant decisions applying the Supreme Court’s opinion in AT&T Mobility v. Concepcion (see my blog post about the Concepcion decision) – the Northern District of California decision in In re California Title Insurance Antitrust Litigation, No. 08-01341 JSW, slip op. (N.D. Cal. June 27, 2011). …

A new Sixth Circuit opinion in two putative class actions involving rates for title insurance demonstrates several lessons generally applicable to insurance class actions.  In Randleman v. Fidelity National Title Insurance Company, the plaintiffs claimed that title insurers failed to provide proper discounts for refinancing of mortgages.  The applicable Ohio rate manual provided that…