The Secret History of Claims Correspondence
How American law spent ninety years building the framework every carrier now operates within
Table of Contents
- A Note on Sources Certain landmark cases appear in more than one chapter. Comunale v. Traders & General Insurance Co. (1958), which embedded an affirmative duty to…
- Introduction In 1973, a man named Max Gruenberg watched his cocktail lounge burn down in Los Angeles. He filed a claim with Aetna Insurance Company. What happened next…
- Ch 1: Reservation of Rights The Letter That Changed Everything Before there was a reservation of rights letter, there was a trap. An insurer facing a liability claim against its…
- Ch 2: The Acknowledgment Letter The First Word Before there was a denial letter, before there were status updates or closing letters, there was the acknowledgment — the simplest, most…
- Ch 3: The Denial Letter When “No” Became a Regulated Word For most of the twentieth century, an insurance company could deny a claim with a phone call, a terse letter, or…
- Ch 4: Status Updates How American Courts and Regulators Turned “We’ll Get Back to You” into a Legal Obligation There was a time when an insurance company could accept your…
- Ch 5: Closing Letters Of all the correspondence obligations that have accumulated around the American insurance claim, the closing letter is the youngest, the least uniform,…
- Ch 6: Bad Faith Of all the forces that shaped modern claims correspondence, none proved more powerful than the threat of being sued for doing it wrong. The legal doctrine…
- Ch 7: Duty to Defend The Letter That Starts a War There is a peculiar paradox at the heart of liability insurance. An insurer sells a policy that promises two things: it will…
- Ch 8: Diminished Value Every automobile that has been in a collision carries a scar in its history. Even after the best body shop in town replaces every crumpled panel, repaints…
- Ch 9: The Modern Letter How Format, Delivery, and Language Requirements Reshaped Claims Correspondence For most of the twentieth century, insurance claims correspondence was a…
- Ch 10: LOB-Specific Where One-Size-Fits-All Ends The previous nine chapters of this book tell a story of convergence. Across decades of case law, regulatory rulemaking, and…
- Epilogue Before there was a reservation of rights letter, there was a trap. That was the opening line of this book, and it described a world in which insurers…