Month: November 2010

Rigsby qui tam Status Hearing postponed – ?

Your guess is as good as mine – the notice on the docket simply said:

RESET STATUS HEARING: Status Hearing RESET for 1/12/2011, 1:00 P.M., in Courtroom 506, Gulfport, Ms, before District Judge L. T. Senter, Jr. ALL Attorneys, who will participate in Trial, to be present.

If I learn more, SLABBED won’t keep you guessing.

May I have your attention for an important annoucement

Back in August 2009 we put together what we termed a legal confab involving policyholder lawyers litigating wind-water cases where lawyers from Mississippi and Louisiana compared notes to the benefit of their policyholder clients. I think those that attended now understand the presentation they saw forms the basis of Ex Rel Denenea v Allstate and as an added bonus we listened to the sultry voice of State Farm call center adjuster Lorrie Beno as she spilled her guts to a PI. For our part our work on the Slabberator and Nowdy’s excellent work on breaking down claims adjusting software was our earn in.

We limited the audience to plaintiff’s lawyers, selected members of the media and a representative from Congressman Gene Taylor’s office.  As legal strategy was discussed we didn’t want the other side to benefit from what we knew thus the security measures.  We had plaintiff’s lawyers contact us from as far away as West Virginia and had an inquiry from Mississippi State Government on attending.  (The plaintiff’s lawyers was invited but MID was not.)

Along those lines we continue to be humbled by the quality of our readership from across this land.  Several months ago I contacted Rutgers Law Professor Jay Feinman, author of Delay, Deny and Defend and a friend to this blog to see if he come down here for book signing and possibly speak at another legal confab.  I just heard from Jay and he will be down here in Soggy Bottom at the tail end of March and he’d be delighted to stay over a day or so to participate in the first annual Slabbapalooza.  We’re targeting March 25th.

I’d like to invite the entire Slabbed Nation, even you guys on the insurance defense bar and at LDOI and MID to come hear Professor Feinman speak. We’d like to keep this a free event and I can do that over here in Soggy Bottom but we are not averse to holding it in NOLA, access to meeting space being the main concern.

We’re trying to gauge interest so we can hone the event.  Shoot me an email or leave a comment on this post. I’ll update when we have a firm date, time and place.

As always we thank you for your support.

sop

Oh hell yeah!!! Wikileaks founder says a major banking scandal is next.

In an exclusive interview, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange told Forbes that his whistleblower site will release tens of thousands of documents from a major U.S. financial firm in early 2011. Assange said the documents could “take down a bank or two.”

Didn’t I read someplace that the Republicans have repealing the recently passed financial re-regulation legislation as a priority for next year? ‘Tis a silly world when economic theory becomes a religion eh folks….

Also Dr William Black at the U of Missou, well-known and liked here in the Slabbed Nation opines that the Treasury Secretary, along with the Chairman of the Fed are crooked sacks of shit.  I tend to agree.  (H/T Mr CLS)

sop

I reckon the folks at McKinsey and Company didn’t check with a lawyer before designing that new fangled way of adjusting insurance claims…

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_WGg1PQPhns]

Sometimes a quick video clip says it all. Texas law requires insurance adjusters to be “open and honest” with homeowners and deal with them in a way that is “fair and reasonable.” But insurance companies regularly fail to abide by their legal duties to homeowners. And in this deposition footage, a home insurance adjuster just can’t explain why he has so much difficulty understanding the law.

sop

Working girls: “Hell is empty, and all the devils are here.”

Here is a quick blast from the past for our newer readers circa early 2009 where we explored the employement history of Senator Chris Dodd’s wife, Jackie Clegg Dodd, as companies her husband oversaw chairing the Senate Banking Committee had a curious preference for hiring Ms Dodd, especially the now taxpayer supported AIG.

Meantime over at Yahoo ALL Mr CLS finished his Thanksgiving reading and added Wendy Gramm, wife of former Texas Senator Phil Gramm, architect of the financial deregulation bill that ultimately imploded our financial system, who had a preference for working at ENRON and State Farm. Continue reading “Working girls: “Hell is empty, and all the devils are here.””

BREAKING NEWS – Judge Senter denies Haag Engineering’s Motion for Summary Judgment in Rigsby qui tam

With just one day remaining before the December 1st Status Conference, Judge Senter continues to clear motions on the docket of ex rel Rigsby v State Farm.  Today he made short work of one – granting the Government’s Motion to Dismiss Forensic (FAEC) Without Prejudice – and moved on to a bigger piece of work, denying Haag Engineering Company’s Motion for Summary Judgment:

For the reasons set out below, this motion will be denied.

Relators have alleged that Haag participated, along with State Farm Fire and Casualty Company (State Farm), in a conspiracy to submit false claims for reimbursement of flood insurance payments made after Hurricane Katrina. The Realtors contend that this conspiracy was intended to maximize flood insurance payments and thereby reduce payments made to settle wind insurance claims.

There is no direct evidence that such a conspiracy existed. Relators rely upon the statements in a report Haag prepared for State Farm and the use to which State Farm put that report.  Relators contend that this report contains factual errors concerning the timing and effect of the storm winds and storm surge flooding and that these errors gave State Farm a plausible basis for giving its adjustors instructions that resulted in overpaying a substantial number of flood claims. Continue reading “BREAKING NEWS – Judge Senter denies Haag Engineering’s Motion for Summary Judgment in Rigsby qui tam”

And the Wall Street Journal put two reporters on the story and still managed to butcher it. An Allstate Hurricane Katrina Fraud Update.

I recently met with a group of political strategists that noticed our little blog in Soggy Bottom and the information exchange was very enlightening for me.  I’m as interested in the mechanics of the story as the story itself and the tales I was told of how these folks manipulated the traditional media were very interesting.  More than any other skill set these folks had a keen understanding of human behavior which is a shared passion with us at Slabbed.

The garden variety bashing I sometime engage in to drive traffic sometimes obscures the fact Slabbed is in reality a quest for knowledge as in getting all the facts that surrounded the blanket denials of insurance coverage  after Katrina no matter where those facts may lead.  This may sound elementary, indeed even simplistic, but I’d submit we stand in stark contrast to our own insurance regulators that ignored all the evidence of fraud on part of their corporate benefactors from the insurance industry after Katrina, Mike Chaney even going so far as to attack the Rigsby sisters, who exposed the fraud perpetrated by State Farm on the US Treasury here in Mississippi.  This frankly came as no surprise to me, especially after it came out that the lawyer who ran the market conduct study for Mr Chaney left the Mississippi Department of Insurance for State Farm’s Jackson based law firm.

Insurance companies have lots of money to throw around and spend vast sums of money on shills, propagandists and their own in-house PR departments. These folks are mostly rent an opinion hookers that dispense half-truths in furtherance of their own paychecks.  Armed with lots of factoids and ready made quotes, deadline pressed journalists flock to them in droves, often uncritically lapping up the intellectually dishonest drivel folks like the III’s Robert Hartwig, who this past summer passed off a bogus poll about the NFIP to the media.  To her credit, Becky Mowbray over at the T-P busted Hartwig and frankly I was amused at Mike Chaney’s blatant duplicity in the Sun Herald’s reporting on the same topic.  I guess Chaney tells so many whoppers he can’t keep them all straight but that is another post.

I mention all this because Ashby Jones and Joanne Lublin recently wrote a story for the Wall Street Journal on the topic of corporate whistleblowers and the new financial re-regulation legislation which is so full of self-serving corporate PR spin these two journalists should be ashamed, Continue reading “And the Wall Street Journal put two reporters on the story and still managed to butcher it. An Allstate Hurricane Katrina Fraud Update.”