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Badillo v. Mid Century Insurance Co.6/21/2005
orensic insights into the claim. The relevant inquiry must be confined to the state of mind and to the intent of the insurer at the critical time in question. Even assuming that the favorable verdict on reasonableness was based in no part on the irrelevant evidence regarding the third party's state of mind, there is here no evidence that can satisfy the element of insurer's bad faith.
To establish insurer's bad faith, the proof must demonstrate that the insurer's conduct was taken in disregard of the requisite good-faith intent. There is no evidence in this record which shows that Farmers/Mid Century failed to act without an honest intention to abstain from taking any unconscientious advantage of Badillo. Nothing in the record suggests that the actions of the insurers amounted to anything greater than an unreasonable error in judgment. No record proof demonstrates that insurers' failure to produce the insured for a statement was done in a bad-faith effort to avoid or defeat their own liability to Badillo.
The insured's claim attempts to create a new remedial construct utterly foreign to Oklahoma's bad-faith jurisprudence. The new tort would best be described as cross-pollination of hand-selected elements of an insurer's good-faith duty to indemnify an insured and of its obligation to defend against claims and to settle them within the limits of the policy. Any insurer who fails successfully to settle a covered loss with a third party prior to the commencement of litigation or within the limits of the policy would , under the new construct, be held liable if, in retrospect, its failure could be deemed unreasonable. The new delict would eliminate good-faith element now present in the Christian tort, transfer the benefit of an insurer's contract obligation to a third party, and utterly remove the demand requirement as a trigger of the insurer's duty to defend or to settle within the limits of the policy. Under the existing Christian jurisprudence, the insured can prove here no claim either for failure to indemnify or to defend. It is solely through the guise of a clever cross-pollination construct that liability came to be imposed upon the insurers in this suit.
III. OKLAHOMA DOES NOT REQUIRE AUTOMOBILE LIABILITY INSURERS TO ASSIST OR COOPERATE WITH THIRD-PARTY PLAINTIFFS IN THEIR EFFORTS TO SEARCH FOR ACTORS, OTHER THAN THE INSURED, WHO MAY BE LIABLE TO SUIT
Insurers attempted to indemnify Badillo, and when their attempt was rejected by the third party Badillo was provided a defense. Insurers, who merely refused to produce Badillo for a statement, were held liable here for failure to aid the third-party claimant's lawyers. Producing Badillo would only have aided the third party in crafting a case against Badillo. There was no expectation Badillo would be exonerated of liability after giving the statement.
The focus of any analysis of an insurer's offending conduct must concentrate exclusively on the effects that conduct may have had upon the insured. A third party may receive a benefit from an insurer's conduct only when that benefit is conferred incidentally as a consequence of an action taken to benefit the insured. Insurers had no duty to aid the third-party claimant if to do so was not absolutely necessary to benefit Badillo. There was no assurance that aiding third-party claimant's lawyers would have been of benefit to Badillo. Liability was incorrectly foisted upon the insurers for failing to aid a third party when that action's benefit to the insured was not shown to be anything more than a remote possibility.
IV. THE STANDARD OF CARE, WHOSE BREACH GIVES RISE TO AN ACTIONABLE TORT CLAIM AGAINST THE INSURER, CALLS FOR A SHOWING OF
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