Insurance Bad Faith Lawyer in Renton, WA

The Short Answer 

 

• Bad faith usually becomes important when your own insurance company fails to provide the protection or benefits you bought. A frustrating dispute with somebody else’s insurer is generally a different legal problem.
• Not every denial, delay, low offer, or maddening adjuster is acting in bad faith. The important question is whether the insurer reasonably investigated the claim, fairly considered the evidence, followed the policy and governing rules, and had a reasonable basis for what it did.
• Our first goal is usually to fix the claim. If the insurer has the information it needs, understands the problem, and still refuses to handle the claim reasonably, then we start looking at bad faith, IFCA, the Consumer Protection Act, and litigation.

Tell me what insurance you bought, what happened that made you need it, and what the company is refusing to do.

You bought insurance for the bad day.

Someone gets badly hurt. Your car is destroyed. Your house is damaged. A driver with too little insurance changes your life. You pay premiums year after year because, if something terrible happens, you want a strong insurance company standing behind you.

Then the bad day comes, and your insurance company becomes another problem.

Maybe it denies a claim you thought was obviously covered. Maybe the adjuster keeps asking for information but never seems to make a decision. Maybe the company ignores important evidence, offers far less than you expected, or tells you the policy says something you cannot find anywhere in the policy.

When the Company You Bought Protection From Becomes Part of the Problem

Sometimes the company eventually pays, but only after months or years of fighting.

That can feel like betrayal because this is not just some stranger’s insurance company. This is a company you paid to protect you.

Washington law recognizes that insurance companies have special responsibilities to the people they insure. They are allowed to investigate claims. They are allowed to ask hard questions. They are allowed to disagree with you.

What they are not allowed to do is handle your claim unreasonably.

At Galileo Law, that is where we start: What did the insurance company promise you, what did it actually do, and was the way it handled your claim fair and
reasonable?

What is Insurance Bad Faith in Washington?

People sometimes call us furious with their insurance company and say, “This has to be bad faith.”

Maybe.

But not every frustrating claim is a bad-faith case.

Insurance claims are unpleasant even when everyone follows the rules. The company may reasonably need records, estimates, photographs, medical information, or time to investigate. Two reasonable people can disagree about what a loss is worth. An adjuster can make a mistake and later correct it.

Even a low offer does not automatically prove bad faith.

Suppose we think a serious injury claim is worth $300,000 and the insurer thinks it is worth $150,000. That is a very important disagreement, but the size of the disagreement alone does not tell us whether the company acted improperly.

We become much more concerned when the process stops making sense. Maybe the insurer refuses to investigate evidence that could prove its position wrong. Maybe it keeps repeating the same conclusion after the facts supporting that conclusion have fallen apart. Maybe it misstates what the policy says. Maybe it drags out a decision without a good reason or refuses to explain why it is denying or reducing the claim.

The line between a hard insurance dispute and bad faith can be gray.

First-Party vs. Third-Party Insurance Claims

This distinction surprises a lot of people.

If another driver hurts you and their insurance company treats you badly, that may be frustrating, unfair, or strategically important to your injury case. But that company generally did not sell you an insurance policy.

Bad-faith law becomes especially important when the problem involves your own insurance relationship.

That might include your:

• Collision coverage after your vehicle is damaged;
• PIP coverage for crash-related medical care;
• Uninsured or underinsured motorist coverage after someone without enough insurance hurts you;
• Homeowner or business insurance after a covered property loss;
• Liability insurance when your insurer is supposed to defend or protect you from a claim.

So one of our first questions is very simple:

What did you buy from this insurance company, and what are you asking it to do?

Once we understand the promise, we can start evaluating whether the company kept it.

Understanding where the gray ends is part of the job.

Washington Insurance Bad Faith, IFCA, and CPA Claims

Washington has several overlapping laws designed to protect people from unfair insurance practices.

You do not need to know which one applies before you call us. But it helps to understand the basic map.

Insurance Bad Faith

“Bad faith” is the general idea that an insurance company has to deal fairly and honestly with its own policyholder.

The insurer does not have to agree with you about everything. But it should conduct a reasonable investigation, fairly consider the information it receives, understand its own policy, and make decisions based on the facts rather than simply looking for the cheapest possible answer.

Bad faith is usually not about finding one magic word in an adjuster’s email. We look at the whole course of the claim.

What did the company know? What did it investigate? What did it ignore? What did it tell you? Did its position make sense in light of the evidence?

Insurance Fair Conduct Act Claims (IFCA)

IFCA stands for the Insurance Fair Conduct Act.

Washington voters created IFCA to give people additional tools when their own insurance company unreasonably denies coverage or refuses to pay benefits that should be paid.

IFCA can make an insurance dispute much more serious for the company. Depending on the facts, the law can allow recovery of the harm caused by the insurer’s conduct, attorney fees and litigation costs, and sometimes additional damages.

But IFCA is not a jackpot statute. Finding a technical violation of an insurance rule does not automatically mean someone wins an IFCA case or receives multiplied damages.

The basic question remains much more understandable: Did the insurer unreasonably refuse to provide insurance protection or benefits it should have provided?

Washington Consumer Protection Act Claims

Washington also has a Consumer Protection Act, usually shortened to CPA.

The CPA applies much more broadly than insurance. It is designed to protect people and businesses from unfair or deceptive business practices.

Insurance companies are businesses, so particularly unfair claims practices can sometimes create a CPA claim in addition to—or instead of—other insurance claims.

The CPA and IFCA are different laws with different requirements. Bad faith is different again.

A serious insurance dispute may involve one of them, several of them, or none of them.

You do not need to diagnose that yourself.

That is what the lawyer is for.

What Does Fair Insurance Claims Handling Actually Look Like?

Washington has detailed rules telling insurance companies how claims should be handled.

The basic ideas are not hard to understand.

An insurer should not misrepresent important facts or what its policy says. It should reasonably investigate before denying a claim. It should respond to important
communications. It should explain why it is denying a claim or offering less than the policyholder believes is owed. And when the evidence becomes clear, the company should not force its insured through needless additional fighting simply to obtain benefits that should already be paid.

Those rules matter because they give us something concrete to compare the company’s behavior against.

Suppose an insurer decides your injury was caused by an old medical condition. Did it actually obtain and read the records that would answer that question?

Suppose the company says a particular repair is excluded. Does the policy really say that?

Suppose an adjuster rejects a major part of a UIM claim. What evidence did the adjuster rely on? What evidence pointed the other way? Did anyone fairly consider it?

These questions turn “My insurance company is treating me terribly” into something we can actually investigate.

What Evidence Can Reveal Insurance Bad Faith?

One of the most important questions in a bad-faith case is also one of the simplest:

What information did the company have when it made its decision?

Years later, everyone may know more. Doctors may understand the injury better.

Lawyers may have taken depositions. Experts may have reviewed the file. A person who was still recovering during the claim may now know which problems became permanent.

It would not be fair to judge an old claims decision using information nobody had at the time.

So we reconstruct the claim as it actually happened. We want to know what was in the file, what information the client provided, what the adjuster requested, what the investigation revealed, and what the company did with that information.

Sometimes that investigation shows that the insurer made a defensible decision based on what it reasonably knew at the time.

Sometimes it shows something very different.

Maybe the company had important evidence and ignored it. Maybe the adjuster never performed the investigation necessary to answer the question. Maybe a supervisor knew the original reasoning no longer held up, but the company refused to change course.

Bad faith is often found not in one dramatic document, but in the story those decisions tell when we put them in order.

How UIM Claims Can Lead to Insurance Bad Faith Disputes

Underinsured motorist coverage—usually called UIM—is one of the clearest examples of why insurance disputes can feel so personal.

Someone else causes a serious crash. That driver does not carry enough liability insurance to compensate you for the harm. Fortunately, you bought UIM coverage from your own insurance company for exactly that situation.

You make the claim expecting your company to help.

Instead, your insurer may question your medical care, whether all your symptoms came from the crash, how much income you lost, whether you have really recovered, or what the disruption to your life is worth.

The relationship suddenly feels backward.

That does not mean your insurer is automatically acting in bad faith. Your company still has the right to investigate and evaluate the claim. But it also has to do that work fairly.

This is one reason we care so much about telling the client’s story before a lawsuit.

A claim file filled only with medical bills and diagnosis codes may not tell the adjuster that a previously energetic parent now works all day and spends every evening
recovering on the couch. It may not show that a concussion changed someone’s concentration, patience, memory, or ability to handle noise. It may not explain that chronic pain slowly removed golf, sleep, household work, intimacy, and ordinary freedom from someone’s life.

If we later argue that the insurer failed to understand the person, we want to know whether the company was actually given a fair opportunity to understand them.

Then, if the insurer had the story and the evidence and still refused to meaningfully confront it, we have a different conversation.

Paul Veillon Has Been Studying Washington Insurance Law for Years

Insurance bad faith is not a practice area Galileo Law recently added because somebody searched the phrase on Google.

Paul Veillon has been studying, writing about, and teaching insurance law for years. In 2017, the Washington Supreme Court issued its first major decision interpreting IFCA, Perez-Crisantos v. State Farm. The decision mattered enormously to lawyers handling insurance cases because it changed how IFCA claims could be framed. The Washington State Association for Justice asked Paul and attorney Kristine Grelish to analyze the decision for Washington trial lawyers. Their article, “After Perez-
Crisantos: What Have We Arguably Lost, What Was Preserved, What Don’t We Know, and How Best to Move Forward With IFCA Claims,” ran on the front page of Trial News.

The approach in that article still reflects how we think about these cases today.

Do not start with outrage and work backward toward a lawsuit.

Start with the insurance promise. Identify what the company owed. Determine what it provided and what it failed to provide. Understand the rules that governed the claim. Then look carefully at whether the company acted reasonably and what harm it conduct actually caused.

Paul also teaches other lawyers about presenting UIM and insurance bad-faith cases to juries, including how the injury story and the insurance-company story fit together.

That does not mean every insurance dispute should become litigation.

It means we know enough about the hard cases to recognize one.

What Types of Insurance Disputes Does Galileo Law Handle?

Galileo Law evaluates select insurance bad-faith and coverage matters.

We are not trying to become a high-volume firm for every disagreement somebody has with an insurance company. Our strongest experience overlaps with other areas we already know deeply, including serious injury claims, UIM, automobile insurance, collision repair, diminished value, and significant vehicle-property disputes.

We may evaluate matters involving:

• Serious UIM or uninsured motorist claims;
• PIP disputes;
• Collision repair and total-loss claims;
• Diminished-value claims, especially involving high-value vehicles;
• Significant coverage disputes;
• Claims in which the insurer’s investigation or conduct has become a serious problem;
• Other first-party insurance disputes where the amount at stake and the claims handling justify deeper review.

Insurance law can also involve homeowner claims, business losses, liability coverage, and specialized commercial policies. Sometimes Galileo will be the right firm for those cases. Sometimes another lawyer will be a better fit.

If we are not the right lawyer, we would rather tell you that than manufacture a practice area we do not actually want.

Can an Insurance Dispute Be Resolved Without a Lawsuit?

Our first goal is usually to fix the claim.

We do not try to “set up” insurance companies so they will make mistakes and create a second lawsuit.

If the insurance problem can be fixed, we would rather fix it.

Maybe the adjuster overlooked an important document. Give them the document.

Maybe the company misunderstood the repair. Explain it.

Maybe the medical presentation does not tell the full injury story. Make the story clearer.

Maybe the insurer is relying on a policy interpretation that does not make sense. Show them why and ask them to reconsider.

There is no prize for creating three years of litigation that could have been avoided with one thoughtful letter and a serious conversation.

But patience has limits. If the company has the evidence, understands the problem, and continues handling the claim unreasonably while the policyholder suffers the consequences, Washington law gives insured people meaningful ways to fight back.

That is when we use them.

What Can Someone Recover in a Bad-Faith Case?

The answer depends on what happened.

Sometimes the most immediate goal is simply obtaining insurance benefits that should have been paid in the first place. In a more serious case, the insurer’s unreasonable conduct may have caused additional financial harm.

Washington’s insurance and consumer-protection laws can also allow successful policyholders to recover attorney fees and certain litigation expenses. In some cases, courts have authority to increase the damages because of the seriousness of the insurer’s conduct.

Those additional remedies are not automatic.

We are cautious about anybody advertising bad-faith litigation as a path to easy “triple damages.” These cases are complicated, expensive, and heavily dependent on the facts.

The purpose of these laws is to give policyholders enough leverage that an insurance company cannot simply make unreasonable claims decisions secure in the knowledge that the worst thing that could happen is being ordered to pay exactly what it should have paid in the first place.

How Do I know if I have an Insurance Bad Faith Case?

You may have no idea.

That is completely fine.

You do not need to read Washington insurance regulations before calling us. You do not need to know what IFCA stands for. You do not need to figure out whether the problem is “bad faith,” “CPA,” “coverage,” or just an adjuster who is driving you crazy.

Tell us what happened.

What insurance did you buy? What happened that caused you to need it? What did you ask the company to do? What did it say? What information did you give them? Did the explanation make sense? What has happened since?

If you have the policy, denial letter, estimates, medical presentation, emails, arbitration documents, or claim correspondence, we can look at those too.

If the file is a disaster, bring us the disaster.

We will start by getting curious.

Talk With a Washington Insurance Bad Faith Lawyer

If you are angry with your insurance company and do not know whether what happened is frustrating, legally wrong, or actually bad faith, that is a perfectly good reason to call us.

Sometimes we will look at the situation and tell you the company has a reasonable position.

Sometimes the underlying claim simply needs to be presented better.

Sometimes there has been a mistake that can still be fixed without litigation.

And sometimes the company you paid to protect you has stopped playing by the rules.

Galileo Law handles the hard insurance questions because understanding those questions makes us better at everything else we do for injured people. We know how insurance companies evaluate claims, where legitimate disagreement ends, and when somebody needs to push back.

We stand with you. We fight for you.

To talk with Galileo Law about an insurance bad-faith or coverage problem, call (206) 537-4000 or contact us online. The consultation is free, and there is no obligation to hire us.