New Hurricane Harvey Opinion Provides a Roadmap to Defeating Common Policyholder Attorney Tactics

Policyholders attorneys often try to skip the threshold steps of bringing their client’s claim within coverage and allocating between covered and non-covered causes of loss.  Instead, the policyholder attorney would have the insurer first disprove coverage, or at least first justify its coverage position.  These tactics unfold in a familiar way. The policyholder attorney will engage a consultant to write up an Xactimate estimate.  Or, perhaps a public adjuster already wrote up the estimate and then brought the claim to the attorney.  Everything that is wrong with the structure will go into the estimate.  Every water-stained ceiling tile, bent AC condenser fin, and dent on the siding will go into the estimate regardless of causation.  The bigger estimate, the better…