The Importance Of Wording Discovery Requests For An Insurance Disability Attorney
It is very important for an insurance disability attorney to word discovery requests very carefully. Too often insurance disability attorneys make the mistake of seeking too much information when they request discovery. The Court sides with the insurance company and the necessary information is not obtained.
So how does an insurance disability attorney make sure that he or she gets what they need? The following case provides positive guidance on how to do the job correctly.
Mary Flanders filed a claim for long-term disability benefits under a plan that she had participated in as an employee at Citibank. Unum Life Insurance Company administered the plan for Citibank. Her disability attorney wanted to demonstrate connections between employee performance evaluations and employee claims decisions. In order to do this, her insurance disability attorney filed a joint discovery motion on May 1st, 2008.
An Unum Attorney Argues That Discovery Is Unnecessary
An Unum attorney was asked to produce performance evaluations for the 9 Unum employees who evaluated Ms. Flander’s claim during the years 2003, 2004 and 2005. Unum argued that producing this information was outside the scope of discovery allowed by the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974. Unum also argued that the scope of the request was too broad. The company claimed it would take too much time to collect the information and that it was neither relevant nor reasonably calculated to lead to the discovery of admissible evidence. This argument, which has been used frequently, was that Ms. Flanders was seeking personal information that could be found in the employee’s personal files.
The Need For Discovery Is Demonstrated Clearly By An Insurance Disability Lawyer
In this case the insurance disability lawyer made it clear that the reason he was seeking this information was to discover an indication that employees who denied benefits received higher evaluation ratings. Discovery of this information would be filed to demonstrating a conflict of interest in the claims handling process at Unum. He also argued that the scope of discovery was reasonably limited, so there would be no argument that the case infringed on Unum employees’ personal information. Therefore, you should be sure to contact an experienced insurance disability lawyer in order to proceed with a disability insurance case.
