My Property Insurance Company is Delaying My Claim: What Can I Do?

Posted December 25, 2017

Oklahoma has enacted key insurance regulations that provide critically important protection to policyholders. Under state law, your property insurance company has a legal duty to use good faith settlement practices. When you bring a property damage claim, your insurance company owes you several different duties. One of these duties is to investigate and resolve your property insurance claim in a reasonably efficient manner.

 

Simply put, your insurance company cannot throw your claim file at the bottom of the stack, in the hopes that you will get frustrated and give up on pursuing your claim. Insurance companies are legally prohibited from using delay as a tactic to push a policyholder into a low or unfair settlement offer. Unfortunately, in spite of these rules, far too many insurance companies still use delay as a settlement tactic. In this post, our top-rated Oklahoma City bad faith insurance attorneys explain what you need to know about insurance company delays in Oklahoma.

 

What Constitutes an Unreasonable Delay?

 

Defining an ‘unreasonable delay’ in a property insurance case can be extremely challenging. There is not necessarily a clear deadline by which your claim should be fully resolved. Some types of property damage claims genuinely do take a considerable amount of time to investigate and to resolve. On the other hand, there are also some types of property insurance claims that should be paid out in a relatively short order. This raises a key question: How do you know if your insurance company’s delay rises to the level bad faith?

 

In answering this question, there are several different factors that you should consider. Specifically, you should ask yourself the following five questions:

 

1. Are the insurance company’s representatives seemingly unwilling to investigate your claim?
2. Are you having trouble getting clear answers on what you need to do to get your claim processed and resolved?
3. Does it appear that the insurance company’s investigation was sloppy?
4. Are you having a hard time getting in touch with anyone at the insurance company who can actually help answer your basic questions?
5. Has a significant amount of time passed since you submitted your claim?

 

If the answer to any of those questions is ‘yes’, you might have been the victim of an unreasonable insurance company delay. Indeed, you could even potentially have good cause to bring a bad faith insurance claim against your insurance company. At the very least, you owe it yourself to have your case comprehensively review by a qualified Oklahoma bad faith insurance claims attorney.

 

Contact Our Oklahoma City Bad Faith Insurance Lawyers Today

 

At The Bennett Law Firm, our dedicated Oklahoma bad faith insurance lawyers have extensive experience handling cases in which insurance companies have unreasonably delayed claims. To learn more about what our legal team can do for you, please contact us today for a free case evaluation. We represent policyholders throughout the region, including in Oklahoma County, Logan County, Lincoln County, and Canadian County.