CVN screenshot of plaintiff attorney Kimball Jones delivering his closing argument
Las Vegas, NV - A Nevada state court jury slammed USAA with a $100 million punitive damages verdict Friday in a bad faith lawsuit over the insurance giant’s delays in paying out a claim for a zero-fault insured driver involved in a rear-end collision, and the full trial was recorded gavel-to-gavel by Courtroom View Network.
The Clark County jury awarded the $100 million, in addition to $14 million in compensatory damages, over USAA’s actions following a 2018 collision involving plaintiff Timothy Kuhn. USAA determined Kuhn was not at fault after being rear-ended in stationary highway traffic, but when Kuhn sued the driver who hit him to collect damages related to a concussion USAA intervened and argued Kuhn was responsible for the crash.
Kuhn then incorporated bad faith claims against USAA into his lawsuit against the driver, arguing they breached their obligations to him by arguing in court filings that Kuhn caused the accident after already determining he wasn’t at fault. USAA maintained Kuhn’s head injury wasn’t as serious as he claimed, and that a lengthy review process before making a $250K policy limit payout offer on the eve of trial reflected the complexity of the claim versus acting in bad faith.
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Kuhn quickly recovered from the neck and back injuries he suffered in the accident, but his attorneys detailed how he struggled with the classic symptoms of a traumatic brain injury and racked up huge medical bills seeing neurologists across the country.
The other driver’s insurer made a policy limit payout, and Kuhn’s attorneys said a policy limit payout from USAA after agreeing the other driver was 100 percent at fault would have resolved the dispute, but USAA would not budge from a $10,000 offer - a decision Kuhn’s attorneys found baffling.
“We are still at a loss of why USAA did not resolve this earlier, other than them thinking that they could get by on their reputation,” said Joshua Berrett of Bighorn Law after the trial.
Berrett described how his firm frequently sees insurers intervene on behalf of the at-fault driver in an attempt to minimize the damages of their own insured, a practice that he says violates their obligation to act in good faith towards their clients.
“They seem to lose sight of the duties they owe to their own insured, and just do everything they can to minimize the amount they have to pay on the claim,” he said.
A USAA spokesperson told CVN the company respectfully disagrees with the verdict, which they do not feel is supported by the evidence.
“We will evaluate our legal options and continue to focus on our century-long commitment to serving our members,” he said.
Berrett said that while his team didn’t get to speak with any jurors after the trial, he believes USAA’s decision to make a policy limit payout on the eve of trial while denying that Kuhn suffered a brain injury cast the insurer in a bad light, and that was compounded by calling two expert witnesses who argued Kuhn’s head injury wasn’t real despite what Berrett said was substantial medical evidence to the contrary.
“The fact that USAA put these experts on the stand after knowing these issues was not received well by the jury, and it demonstrated that USAA was not putting Tim's interest equal to that of USAA and was not searching for evidence to support Tim's claim,” he said.
While USAA pointed to their eventual policy limit payout offer as evidence they ultimately acted in good faith with regards to Kuhn’s claim, Berrett speculated that could have had the opposite effect on the jury.
“They could not come up with a coherent, reasonable explanation of why they paid the limits after so many years of refusing to do so, especially since they were saying the claim was still worth less than the limits even at trial,” he said.
Berrett lamented that this outcome resulted from USAA following standard procedures as opposed to an individually overzealous claims adjuster, which he said speaks to the broader industry issue of large insurers lowballing valid claims.
“We think the adjuster did exactly what she had been trained to do,” he said. “The evidence indicated that the bills were run through the same system that USAA uses for all of their claims, which resulted in arbitrary reduction of the medical bills.”
Berrett suggested large punitive verdicts like these should be a wakeup call to insurers engaged in similar conduct.
“We hope that this verdict will get insurance companies to stop treating their own insureds like they are the adverse party, and start considering the interest of the insureds, like they are supposed to,” he said.
Kuhn was also represented by Kimball Jones and Emily Gable of Bighorn Law.
The defense was represented by DKM Law Group and Lewis Brisbois.
The case is captioned Timothy Kuhn v. Hector Cervantes-Andrade, case number A-20-821602-C in Clark County, Nevada.
E-mail David Siegel at dsiegel@cvn.com
