The “Bad Faith Set-Up” in Insurance Litigation: How to Avoid Risks and Legal Pitfalls

EDWARD J. “Ned” CURRIE, JR., is a Shareholder at Currie Johnson & Myers, PA, with offices in Jackson and Biloxi, Mississippi. Mr. Currie graduated from the University of Mississippi School of Law in 1976.  He has spent his career in the courtroom representing the interests of insurers in complex insurance coverage matters and bad faith defense - as well as personal injury defense - having tried over 175 jury cases to verdict.  Mr. Currie is the immediate Past President of the American College of Coverage and Extracontractual Counsel.  He currently serves on the Board of Directors of the Federation of Defense and Corporate Counsel and on the Mississippi Supreme Court Advisory Committee for the Rules of Civil Procedure.  Mr. Currie is Past President of the Mississippi Defense Lawyers Association which bestowed upon him its 2016 Lifetime Achievement Award, and Past President of the Mississippi Chapter of the Federal Bar Association.  He is a member of the American Law Institute, International Association of Defense Counsel, and is a Fellow of Litigation Counsel of America.  Mr. Currie was recognized by Corporate Intl Magazine as 2016 Mississippi Product Liability Attorney of the Year, by Best Lawyers as 2016 Mississippi Lawyer of the Year for Personal Injury Litigation-Defense, by International Global Law Experts as 2014 Mississippi Product Liability Lawyer of the Year, and by Best Lawyers as 2012 Mississippi Lawyer of the Year for Insurance Law.  He also is listed by Super Lawyers in the Top 50: 2015 Mississippi Super Lawyers and was listed by the Mississippi Business Journal in the 2013 Top 10 Leaders in Law in Mississippi.  Listed by the American Lawyer & Martindale Hubbell as a Top Rated Lawyer in Insurance, Mr. Currie has written and lectured widely on an array of insurance coverage issues.

Michelle Burton is the Managing Partner of Shoecraft ♦ Burton LLP, a boutique civil litigation firm specializing in complex insurance coverage, bad faith defense, insurance defense, and professional liability.  Ms. Burton has obtained numerous jury trial defense verdicts for her clients against multi-million dollar claims throughout California. In addition to her trial practice, Ms. Burton is a Certified Appellate Specialist and has authored and argued numerous appeals addressing insurance-related matters including Douglas v. Fidelity Insurance Company, the leading case on rescission in California. She was trial and appellate counsel on a case consolidated for oral argument with Lee v. California Capital Insurance Co., the recently-decided case which provides important guidance to appraisers and umpires for appraisals involving a disputed scope.  She advocated many of the contentions adopted by the Court of Appeal in its published decision.  Ms. Burton provides Fair Claims Training, Good Faith Claims Handling Training, Insurers Obligations to Resolve Claims and Appraisal Training for her clients. She has also been a panel speaker at the Association of Business Trial Lawyers Annual Seminar on “The Use of Social Media in Jury Selection” and “The Use of Technology During Trial.” She has presented at the Combined Claims Conference on the topic of property appraisals and has given webinars on policy rescission and misrepresentation. She is currently the Vice President of the San Diego Chapter of the Association of Business Trial Lawyers, was recognized as a Lawyer of Distinction in 2015 in Civil Litigation and is a Fellow of the American Bar Foundation which is open to one percent of lawyers for their commitment to the legal profession and their community. Ms. Burton was the Media Chair for the Informed Voters Project educating the public about judicial elections and is the President of Run Women Run a Political Action Committee dedicated to the advancement of women in politics.  Ms. Burton is frequently asked by media to comment on political and legal issues.

Thomas Segalla is a nationally recognized authority on bad faith, reinsurance, and insurance, an ARIAS-U.S. Certified Arbitrator and mediator, and a founding partner of the firm. He has been retained as counsel and as a consultant by numerous major insurance carriers and policyholders in more than 40 jurisdictions nationally and internationally, and has served as an expert witness in more than 100 bad faith, coverage, and extracontractual cases across the country. His practice focuses on the defense, and insurance coverage, and claims-handling process of matters involving bad faith; construction site personal injury accidents (Labor Law §§ 200, 240(1) and 241(6)); toxic tort and environmental issues; and extracontractual, product liability, professional liability and railroad litigation. He also has experience representing and advising life science, pharmaceutical, and medical device industry clients. In 2016, Tom was honored with the Distinguished Alumni Award for Private Practice by the State University of New York at Buffalo Law Alumni Association in recognition of his contributions to the legal profession and the community in which he serves.

Tom is the co-author of the renowned insurance law treatise Couch on Insurance 3d and editor ofthe Reinsurance Professional’s Deskbook published by Thomson Reuters and DRI, and he has published and lectured extensively for many professional organizations and provided in-house training for clients. As a member of the Defense Research Institute (DRI), he currently serves on the organization’s Publications Board and Barrister Task Force and has previously served as Chair of DRI’s Insurance Law Committee, Chair of its Law Institute, and a member of its Board of Directors. In addition, as a member of the Federation of Defense and Corporate Counsel, he is integrally involved in the relationship between the insurance industry and defense counsel. Tom is the immediate past president of the American College of Coverage and Extracontractual Counsel, an organization which brings together the top insurance lawyers representing insurers and policyholders in the U.S. and Canada to focus on the creative, ethical, and efficient adjudication of disputes between policyholders and insurers over insurance coverage as well as extracontractual damages. Recently, Best Lawyers in America named him Buffalo Insurance Law "Lawyer of the Year" and the Defense Association of New York (DANY) presented Tom with its 2014 James S. Conway Award for Outstanding Service to the Defense Community.

Connie Ray Stockham is the managing partner of Stockham, Cooper & Potts, P. C. of which she was a founding member. Upon her entry to the practice of law in the late 1970’s, Connie learned she thrived on the challenging and rapidly evolving torts of bad faith, fraud and products liability in her home state. Fresh out of completing a federal clerkship with U. S. District Judge James Hancock, Connie was entrusted with handling the appeal of one of the first bad faith verdicts in the State of Alabama, which was also the largest verdict in the rural county where it had been rendered. With its reversal, Connie embarked on what has been a career of handling not only matters from the lower court filing but also being the lawyer who is called on an early Saturday morning after a client receives a bad verdict. On the heels of the early bad faith reversal, Connie became involved in the 11th Circuit landmark trigger of coverage litigation, Commercial Union v Sepco. Along the way, she was able to dispense with the bad faith claim in Sepco on summary judgment. Not one to refuse a challenge, Connie represented one of the firm’s long standing insurance clients in a politically charged invasion of privacy case that she took from a $15 million verdict to a $5 million remittitur to a reversal to zero on appeal.

Having founded and successfully led a trial and appellate firm for almost twenty years, Connie thought it was time to take a backseat in the active practice of law and focus more on her role as an adjunct professor in the Honors College at The University of Alabama at Birmingham. She and her clients quickly realized that she was not ready for such a move. Therefore, she recruited a group of seasoned trial lawyers and formed a new law firm that continues to provide the level of excellence and service that her clients have come to expect over the years.

Now having practiced law for more than thirty-nine years, Connie has served as lead attorney in a broad range of complex litigated matters, ranging from bad faith to invasion of privacy, insurance coverage and contractual disputes, reinsurance, construction matters, medical, nursing home and pharmaceutical malpractice products liability, mass tort and environmental actions, personal injury and death cases of many types. Having handled over forty appellate cases, she is called on regularly to take on cases after an adverse judgment to handle appeal and retrial. As one of the Best Lawyers in America, Connie realizes that years of experience now inform the counsel her clients seek and the advocacy she vigorously practices.