In the wake of a series of severe hurricanes and a single law firm’s mass filings, the Western District of Louisiana handled the most insurance cases of any federal district court in the nation during the past three years, according to a report released this week.
The California-based legal tech company Lex Machina said in an annual report that insurance cases filed in the Western District of Louisiana in 2020-2022 numbered, 8,169, more than twice the number of cases filed in the next most active jurisdiction, the Eastern District of Louisiana, where 3,798 cases were filed over that time period.
The 2023 Insurance Litigation Report identified the Houston law firm of McClenny, Moseley and Associates (MMA) as the most active law firm in the U.S. based on its representation of plaintiffs in insurance litigation from 2020 to 2022. The law firm filed 2,766 cases during that time period, the study concluded.
MMA has faced a series of reprimands for its handling of insurance cases, including fines imposed by the state Department of Insurance, class-action lawsuits and stays on the majority of its cases that were ordered by the Louisiana Supreme Court. The high court also suspended MMA’s Louisiana supervising attorney, Richard William Huye III, from practicing law pending the outcome of the legal review.
Nationwide, federal courts handled 18,912 insurance cases last year, a 30% increase over the number of such cases filed the previous year, the report states. Contributing to the spike was litigation related to hurricanes, business interruptions and homeowner policies, according to Lex Machina
“... Our filters showed that this increase was driven by several key subsets of insurance cases such as business liability policy cases, hurricane-related cases and homeowners policy cases,” Ronald Porter, who edited the Lex Machina report, said in a statement emailed to the Louisiana Record. “Our data and analytics supported the data-driven insights that recent natural and economic phenomena, such as hurricanes, wildfires, a pandemic and rising building costs, likely bolstered recent insurance case filings.”
In Louisiana, destructive events such as Hurricane Laura in 2020 and Hurricane Ida in 2021 contributed to such trends, the report states.
During the three-year period examined in the study, Judge James D. Cain Jr. of the Western District of Louisiana handled more insurance cases than any other judge in the nation: 6,877. The next most active judge was also in the Western District of Louisiana. Judge Terry Doughty handled 625 insurance cases during that time.
The most active defendant in the nation during 2020-22 was State Farm Fire & Casualty Co., which was involved in 4,317 insurance cases, the report says.
Copies of the report can be obtained by registering at Lex Machina’s website.