Meltzer Lippe represented an insurance company that wrote automobile policies and outsourced the handling of its no-fault automobile claims to a claims administrator. The administrator performed well below acceptable industry standards. However, a major New York City law firm advised our insurer client that its damages would be difficult to prove because the administrator's errors had been committed in many different ways, in an unknown number of the thousands of case files that they had handled and with varying damage consequences. Compounding the problem, the administrator had only worked on approximately half of the claims files from beginning to end while the balance were either given to them in the middle of the claims handling process or taken away from them before the process had been completed. Nonetheless, Meltzer Lippe filed a multi-million dollar litigation in State Court against the administrator for, among other things, negligent claims handling and breach of contract. After nearly 5 years of contested litigation, we obtained a settlement for our client of approximately $6 million.

Meltzer Lippe's key accomplishments included:

• convincing the Court to accept an extrapolation method of calculating damages over a statistically random sample of the individual claims files, thereby cost effectively eliminating the need to hold 7,000 "mini-trials" to prove damages;
• customizing a random sampling methodology and substantive claims handling audit process that withstood scrutiny from the defendants' experts and enabled us to persuasively demonstrate our client's damages;
• selecting and managing our statistical and claims handling experts throughout the entire litigation; and
• asserting claims against certain controlling officers and directors of the administrator, ultimately adding the defendant's directors' and officers' liability carrier to the mediation table. (This alone resulted in an additional $1 million in the settlement).

Ira Halperin, Jason Blasberg and Loretta Gastwirth were the Meltzer Lippe attorneys primarily responsible for this outstanding result.