Life Insurance Claims

The president of an Ohio-based company was killed in a plane crash en route to a subsidiary company located in New Hampshire. The subsidiary company had purchased a $1.5 million life insurance policy for the president, naming his wife as beneficiary. The insurance carrier, however, denied the widow's claim, asserting that the policy had been canceled nearly a year before the crash due the subsidiary's failure to pay the premium. Rutter & Russin argued that the cancellation was ineffective because Ohio law applied and required a notice of cancellation to be sent to the insured president, not merely the subsidiary responsible for paying the premium. The parties settled for 90% of the policy limits.

The decedent had worked for his employer for over 30 years before retiring. His exit interview was supposed to include the signing of paperwork that would transfer his employer sponsored life insurance policy to an individual policy, but the employer forgot to present the correct forms to the employee, who died only a few months later. The insurance company was unmoved by the procedural snafu, so Rutter & Russin successfully asserted a claim against the employer for the full value of the policy that should have been in force.

The insured had paid premiums for her ex-husband's life insurance policy for over 20 years, even after they were divorced, but that did not mean much to the insurance company, which denied her claim when her husband died because, according to them, the group policy did not covers ex-spouses, but only actual spouses. Rutter & Russin refused to take the insurer's word for it, and pressed the company for not only the underwriting history of the policy, but the written promises that Prudential had made to the insured's employer when it assumed control of the group policy from another carrier that specifically agreed to cover ex-spouses. The insurer backed off, admitted that its denial was wrong, and paid the face amount of the policy.

After her father died, his daughter presented a life insurance claim, which the insurance company denied based on material misrepresentations in an application that was completed two years earlier. The father was not around to defend his answers, but Rutter & Russin obtained the agent's file and the company's underwriting file and showed that the false answers were probably the result of the agent's carelessness, and did not come from the decedent.

A young woman's husband tragically committed suicide following years of depression. The widow submitted a life insurance claim that the insurance company denied, arguing that its policy contained a suicide exclusion. Rutter & Russin established that the suicide exclusion was not in the policy when it was issued, and that the later versions of the policy that contained the suicide exclusion did not apply to this claim. The company paid the claim in full without the filing of a lawsuit.