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Levick Strategic Communications builds brand equity and protects reputations during the highest-stakes global communications challenges of the digital age. Bulletproof Blog, authored by thought leaders from the top crisis firm in America, offers insights and analysis on the most pressing communications issues facing corporations, countries, and interest groups today.

Visit the Levick Corporate Website A lawyer who usually defends insurance companies, Mr. Levy recently won one of the largest plaintiff’s verdicts in Colorado history against Time Insurance (also known as Fortis and Assurant Health). In late January, a jury found for his client Jennifer Latham after the company refused to pay medical bills after she was severely injured in a 2005 auto collision. Ms. Latham’s car had collided with a meth dealer who was fleeing the police in his car. Her insurance coverage was rescinded as a result of “post-claim underwriting,” in which the original policy application was reviewed for false or misleading representations that would allow for revocation even if that information were unrelated to the claim at hand. Marc Levy: Post-claim underwriting is standard industry practice, although not uncontroversial. Congress has been investigating the practice for a few years now and the topic is naturally hotter today because of the current healthcare debate. Henry Waxman has led the chorus of inquiry, but he’s had considerable bipartisan support on this issue. So the first message to the industry is that it ought to be prepared to publicly justify the whole practice of post-claim underwriting because the pressure on them to do so will only increase. So far their justifications have been pretty lame: mainly that they don’t pull medical records before issuing the policy because it is too expensive to do so. What happened here was that the defendant did not adjust its story to fit the facts of the case. The case was defended with the same template...

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