#5 Challenging Insurance Billing Guidelines
In this video, Brian Friel finishes his discussion on the importance of challenging insurance billing guidelines and how insurance carriers attempt to discount corporate policyholder defense costs payments. This video picks up where the prior video addressing how insurance carriers impose unreasonable billing rate caps on lawyers left off. There are many tricks of the insurance trade used by insurance carriers to lower their payment obligations, such as making certain line item deletions on billing entries for the failure to comply with unilaterally imposed insurance billing guidelines. In practice, after applying these lower attorney rates and rejecting billing entries for the failure to comply with insurance billing guidelines, it is not uncommon for corporate policyholders find themselves getting reimbursed only 15%-25% of their legitimate defense costs incurred.
Maximizing Insurance By Challenging Insurance Billing Guidelines
Policyholders are not obligated to accept severe discounts on defense cost, but many accept such deductions. Billing guidelines are generally not enforceable and should be challenged. They are not part of the insurance policy and, in many situations, billing guidelines place defense counsel in an ethical dilemma by making it impossible for them to zealously defend a matter.
Watch our video to learn why billing guidelines are improper, and how corporate policyholders should address billing guideline challenges.