Insurance Class Actions in the United States

by Pace, Nicholas M.; Carroll, Stephen J.; Vogelsang, Ingo; Zakaras, Laura

• ISBN13: 9780833041319
• ISBN10: 0833041312
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2007-02-28
• Publisher: RAND Corporation

Summary

Class actions, which are civil cases in which parties initiate a lawsuit on behalf of other plaintiffs not specifically named in the complaint, often make headlines and arouse policy debates. However, policymakers and the public know little about most class actions. This book presents the results of surveys of insurers and of state departments of insurance to learn more about class litigation against insurance companies.

Table of Contents

Introduction	p. 1
The data gap	p. 2
Study questions and approach	p. 4
The term class action	p. 5
Organization of this monograph	p. 6
Summary of methodological approach	p. 7
The decision to survey insurers	p. 7
Drawing the sample	p. 8
The initial survey	p. 9
The secondary survey	p. 11
Shaping the analysis data set	p. 12
The survey of state departments of insurance	p. 17
Survey results	p. 21
Forum of filing and disposition	p. 21
Geographical coverage of class	p. 22
Choice of jurisdiction	p. 23
Trends in the number of new cases	p. 30
Subjects of the litigation	p. 33
Certification	p. 39
Case outcomes	p. 44
Settlement results	p. 52
What the data suggest about CAFA	p. 58
Issues related to regulation	p. 67
Introduction	p. 67
Insurance industry regulation	p. 69
Understanding when regulation and class actions interact	p. 71
Cases with the strongest regulatory relationship	p. 73
Multistate cases	p. 83
Cases with both strong regulatory issues and multistate classes	p. 90
Regulatory authority as a defense	p. 92
Agency intervention	p. 98
Conclusions	p. 103
Understanding the hidden world of putative class actions	p. 103
The critical certification decision	p. 105
Characteristics of class settlements	p. 106
The future forum for insurance class action litigation	p. 107
Regulatory implications	p. 108
Anatomy of an insurance class action	p. 111
Previous research on class action litigation	p. 119
State departments of insurance survey results	p. 139
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