Following an $8.1 million judgment against Nationwide Insurance, the Georgia Chamber of Commerce has weighed in on the side of the insurer in asking the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals to rein in what it describes as a rising tide of “set-up cases” engineered by lawyers using time-limited policy demands to gin up “bad faith” judgment claims against insurers.
Chamber lawyers and Bryan Cave partners Adwoa Seymour and William Custer argue in an Aug. 23 motion to file an amicus brief with the court that the case is a prime example of a “recent epidemic of bad-faith litigation in Georgia” stemming from the abuse of so-called Holt letters to allow essentially any response for an insured’s policy limits other than immediate acceptance to be deemed negligent and used to support a bad-faith failure to settle.
