by breakinglegalnews.com

Hawaii’s Supreme Court recently made a significant ruling that allows a $4 billion settlement regarding the catastrophic 2023 Maui wildfire to move forward.

This settlement, which involves thousands of lawsuits and various defendants, had been in jeopardy due to the insurance companies seeking the right to pursue their own legal actions against those blamed for the fire, including Hawaiian Electric Company. The court ruled that state laws limiting health care insurance reimbursement also apply to casualty and property insurance, preventing insurers from filing independent claims.

The wildfire, the deadliest in the U.S. in over a century, destroyed much of Lahaina, Hawaii, causing over $5.5 billion in damages and claiming more than 100 lives. The settlement, announced last summer, was initially threatened by the insurers’ demands, but the court’s decision helps clear a crucial hurdle for the victims’ attorneys who feared prolonged litigation and less money available for victims.

Attorneys representing the individual plaintiffs agreed to the deal amid fears that main defendant Hawaiian Electric, the power company blamed for sparking the blaze, could be on the brink of bankruptcy. Other defendants include the state, Maui County and Kamehameha Schools, the largest private landowner in Hawaii.

As of now, the settlement includes seven defendants, including Hawaiian Electric, Maui County, the state of Hawaii, and Kamehameha Schools. While the $4 billion figure is seen as insufficient to fully compensate victims for their losses, it is considered the best option given the financial limitations of the main defendant, Hawaiian Electric. The next steps will be determined by a Maui judge, and this ruling is seen as a significant move toward recovery and healing for the affected communities.

They have seen him smiling on a hostel security camera, but don’t know his name. They found the backpack he discarded while fleeing, but don’t know where he’s gone.

As the search for UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson’s killer goes on, investigators are reckoning with a tantalizing dichotomy: They have troves of evidence, but the shooter remains an enigma.

Police don’t know who he is, where he is, or why he did it, though they are confident it was a targeted attack instead of a random act.

“The net is tightening,” New York City Mayor Eric Adams said Saturday.

Hours after he spoke, police divers were seen searching a pond in Central Park, where the killer fled after the shooting. Officers have been scouring the park for days for any possible clues and found his bag there Friday.

Late Saturday, police released two additional photos of the suspected shooter that appeared to be from a camera mounted inside a taxi. The first shows him outside the vehicle and the second shows him looking through the partition between the back seat and the front of the cab. In both, his face is partially obscured by a blue, medical-style mask.

Retracing the gunman’s steps using surveillance video, police say, it appears he left the city by bus soon after the shooting Wednesday morning outside the New York Hilton Midtown. He was seen on video at an uptown bus station about 45 minutes later, NYPD Chief of Detectives Joseph Kenny said.

With the high-profile search expanding across state lines, the FBI announced late Friday that it was offering a $50,000 reward for information leading to an arrest and conviction, adding to a reward of up to $10,000 that the NYPD has offered. Police say they believe the suspect acted alone.

Police provided no updates on the hunt Saturday, but investigators are urging patience — even with a killer on the loose. Hundreds of detectives are combing through video recordings and social media, vetting tips from the public and interviewing people who might have information, including Thompson’s family and coworkers and the shooter’s randomly assigned roommates at the Manhattan hostel where he stayed.

“This isn’t ‘Blue Bloods.’ We’re not going to solve this in 60 minutes,” Kenny told reporters Friday. “We’re painstakingly going through every bit of evidence that we can come across.”

The shooter paid cash at the hostel, presented what police believe was a fake ID and is believed to have paid cash for taxi rides and other transactions. He didn’t speak to others at the hostel and almost always kept his face covered with a mask, only lowering it while eating.

But investigators caught a break when they came across security camera images of an unguarded moment in which he briefly showed his face soon after arriving in New York on Nov. 24.

Police distributed the images to news outlets and on social media but so far haven’t been able to ID him using facial recognition — possibly because of the angle of the images or limitations on how the NYPD is allowed to use that technology, Kenny said. On Friday evening, investigators found a backpack in Central Park that had been worn by the gunman, police said. They didn’t immediately reveal what, if anything, it contained but said it would be tested and analyzed.

Another potential clue, a fingerprint on an item he purchased at a Starbucks minutes before the shooting, has so far proven useless for identifying him, Kenny said.

Aided by surveillance cameras on nearly every building and block, police have been able to retrace the shooter’s movements.

They know he ambushed Thompson at 6:44 a.m. as the executive arrived at the Hilton for his company’s annual investor conference, using a 9 mm pistol that resembled the guns farmers use to put down animals without causing a loud noise. They know ammunition found near Thompson’s body bore the words “delay,” “deny” and “depose,” mimicking a phrase used by insurance industry critics.

Kenny said the fact that the shooter knew UnitedHealthcare group was holding a conference at the hotel and what route Thompson might take to get there suggested that he could possibly be a disgruntled employee or client.

Police raided a noted French publishing house Wednesday in their investigation of an 83-year-old writer who celebrated pedophilia in his work as court proceedings opened in another case against him.

Investigators raided the offices of French publishing house Gallimard in connection with a preliminary investigation as to whether Gabriel Matzneff raped a minor decades ago, a judicial official said. The official, who wasn't authorized to speak publicly, provided the information on condition of not being named.

The investigators were looking for unpublished passages from Matzneff's writings, according to press reports.

The raid came as lawyers met in a Paris courtroom on another legal front, one concerning Matzneff's recent pieces for news publications in which he defended his relationship with a young girl decades ago as "the exceptional love that we lived together.”

He was 50 at the time, and the girl to whom he referred, Vanessa Springora, was 14. The publication last month of a tell-all book by Springora, "Consent," brought a writer long-forgotten on the literary circuit back into the public eye.

The Blue Angel Association, a French pedophilia prevention group in France, is behind the court case. The group's lawyer, Mehana Mouhou, said he expects to call five to 10 witnesses.

A repeat offender from Caldwell received up to 10 years in prison after pleading guilty to three counts of insurance fraud.

Martha Patricia Feely, sentenced last week in 4th District Court, was already on felony probation in a California insurance fraud case in 2009 when she submitted forged performance bond documents to three southwestern Idaho government agencies.

Performance bonds are necessary to bid on public jobs and ensure a contractor will fulfill its obligations.

Such bonds also ensure subcontractors and suppliers will be paid.

Attorney General Lawrence Wasden said Friday Feely's duplicitousness violates a system where companies usually work ethically to ensure fairness on public works jobs.

When one person breaks the rules, he said, it puts honest business owners at a disadvantage.

The Progressive Corp. insurance group is defending itself against an onslaught of negative publicity after it tried to avoid paying $75,000 to the family of a client killed in a car crash and sought to blame the wreck on her.

The criticism began Monday with a blog post from 33-year-old Matt Fisher of Brooklyn, whose sister Kaitlynn Fisher had Progressive insurance and was killed in a June 2010 car crash in Baltimore. In order to avoid the payout to Kaitlynn Fisher's family, Progressive interjected itself into a lawsuit the Fisher family filed against the other driver.

Last week, a jury found the other driver negligent, despite Progressive's efforts to persuade the jury otherwise.

Matt Fisher said Thursday that the deluge of online support his family has received is gratifying. The backlash against Progressive was strong enough that the Ohio-based company felt compelled to issue a public statement on the case. The statement denied Progressive was representing the driver who was ultimately found negligent. And it prompted even further backlash because it failed to acknowledge that, as a practical matter, Progressive's lawyer was indeed working in court as a third party to combat the Fisher family's claims.

While Fisher didn't quite anticipate the wave of support he received, he was sure others who learned about the case would be as shocked as he was that his sister's own insurance company was going to such lengths to cast the blame on her for the accident.

The California Supreme Court has told insurance companies they must pay up to the policy limits for cleanup of a toxic dump in Riverside County.

Thursday's unanimous decision in the decades-long dispute means the state will likely receive tens of millions of dollars more from insurers to clean up the Stringfellow Acid Pits near Glen Avon.

The industrial waste facility operated by the state from 1956 to 1972 leaked contaminants into ground water.

The Los Angeles Times says the California Supreme Court ruled that consecutive insurance policies require each insurer to pay up to their policy limits for waste site damages.

The court says the state, which purchased multiple policies and paid multiple premiums, should be able to collect up to the policy limit from each company.

A federal appeals court has thrown out the fraud convictions of five former executives from American International Group Inc. and Stamford-based General Re Corp.

The five had been convicted in a $500 million fraud case. But the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on Monday sent the case back to U.S. District Court in Hartford, Conn., for another trial.

Prosecutors had alleged the executives were part of a fraud in which New York-based AIG paid Stamford-based Gen Re in a secret deal to take out reinsurance policies with AIG in 2000 and 2001.

The appeals court found that the trial judge abused his discretion by admitting stock-price data during the trial. It says the judge also gave improper instructions to the jury.

All five executives had been sentenced to prison.

A Georgia insurance company that paid a wrongful death claim on behalf of a former Utah State University fraternity has settled the lawsuit it brought against four of the fraternity's members.

The Herald Journal of Logan reports that attorneys for RSUI Inc. told a 1st District Court judge the company had resolved a dispute with the four men. Court records show attorneys met with the judge April 20 — one day before a planned hearing.

RSUI sought $50,000 each from Sigma Nu pledge Chad Burton and chapter officers Cody Littlewood, Colton Hansen and Mitchell Alm as compensation for a settlement payment to the parents of Michael Starks.

Starks died Nov. 21, 2008, from alcohol poisoning after a fraternity event.

At the time, RSUI was the insurer for the fraternity and its members, including pledges. RSUI attorneys have acknowledged that both the company and the four defendants would have been jointly liable to Starks' parents, George and Jane Starks of Salt Lake City. The company claims it paid the full amount of a settlement with the Starks, although those terms have not been made public.

Insurance companies can use a person's credit report to determine rates, the Michigan Supreme Court said Thursday in declaring that state regulators exceeded their authority when they banned the practice as discriminatory.

The decision ends a legal battle between insurance companies and Gov. Jennifer Granholm's administration that has reached three courts since 2005.

The industry says people with strong credit reports make fewer claims and deserve lower rates than people with weak credit reports. The Supreme Court, in a 4-3 ruling, said Michigan law allows companies to offer people with good credit lower rates.

"It is difficult to see how offering discounts to some insureds on the basis of good insurance scores is inconsistent with the (law's) general purpose of availability and affordability of insurance for all consumers," Justice Maura Corrigan wrote in the majority opinion.

The Supreme Court on Thursday agreed to let an insurance company settle some asbestos lawsuits for about $500 million in exchange for blocking any future litigation resulting from its long relationship with Johns Manville Corp., once the world's largest producer of asbestos.

Travelers Cos. had been named in lawsuits alleging that it tried to hide dangerous health effects of asbestos. The company argued that asbestos claims must be paid out of a trust created by Johns Manville in the 1980s and approved by a federal bankruptcy judge.

Asbestos is a mineral that was commonly used until the mid-1970s in insulation and fireproofing material. Exposure can increase the risk of lung cancer, mesothelioma and other ailments, according to federal health agencies.

Travelers settled with several groups of plaintiffs in 2004 with the caveat that federal courts make clear the company would not have to face any new similar lawsuits. The 2nd U.S Circuit Court of Appeals overturned lower-court approval of the settlement, saying a bankruptcy judge lacked the authority to act so broadly.

The high court on Thursday overturned that decision and sent the case back to the New York-based federal appeals court.

A Barry County judge has ruled that Michigan regulators must stop their practice of denying auto and home insurance rate filings that are based in part on credit scoring.

Friday's ruling by Circuit Judge James Fisher is a victory for the insurance industry in an ongoing dispute with the Michigan Office of Financial and Insurance Regulation. But it may just be temporary because the overall case likely is headed to the Michigan Supreme Court.

Gov. Jennifer Granholm's administration implemented rules to ban the use of credit scores in rate setting in 2005. Insurance companies sued to keep those rules from taking effect.

Insurers and regulators have been fighting in court since.

A federal judge on Monday refused to grant class-action status to lawsuits claiming that thousands of Gulf Coast hurricane victims were exposed to potentially toxic fumes while living in government-issued trailers.

U.S. District Judge Kurt Engelhardt ruled that a batch of lawsuits on behalf of hundreds of plaintiffs against the federal government and several trailer manufacturers can't be handled as a class action because each person's claim is unique and must be examined individually.

Government tests found elevated levels of formaldehyde in many of the trailers that housed victims of Katrina and Rita after those powerful hurricanes clobbered the Gulf Coast in 2005. Formaldehyde is a preservative that can cause breathing problems and is classified as a carcinogen.

Lawyers for the storm victims accuse trailer makers of using shoddy materials and building methods in a rush to meet the government's demand for emergency housing for the displaced. The attorneys had argued that a class-action lawsuit would efficiently resolve all the cases from Louisiana, Texas, Mississippi and Alabama that Engelhardt is presiding over in New Orleans.

But the judge said the cases involve hundreds of trailer models made by dozens of companies and occupied by people with varying medical histories and symptoms.

"Each plaintiffs' claims and alleged injuries will require an examination of individual evidence," Engelhardt wrote in a 50-page ruling.

Tony Buzbee, one of the lead lawyers for plaintiffs, said he respects the judge's decision but hasn't ruled out an appeal.