This past June the California Supreme Court issued its decision in Nickerson v. Stonebridge Life Insurance Company, 63 Cal.4th 363 (2016), holding that post-trial Brandt fees could be included in the damage calculus for purposes of evaluating the ratio of punitive damages to compensatory damages. We wrote about this decision in an earlier blog. The Supreme Court remanded the $19 million punitive verdict to the Court of Appeals to amend the judgment to correct the maximum allowable amount of punitive damages of 10:1, or $475,000. In doing so, the Court of Appeals reissued its original decision. This decision has a number of issues that may guide insurance counsel in handling bad faith cases with a punitive exposure. The policy involved…
