Ricardo Echeverria

Insurance Bad Faith & Catastrophic Personal Injury

Echeverria has brought in nearly $200 million in jury verdicts alone over his nearly three-decade-long career. He is not slowing down.

Last month, he tried a tricky insurance coverage dispute growing out of the October 2017 Tubbs Fire, his first nonjury trial in 15 years. He has another bench trial set for this month, a bad faith case over an insurer’s failure to settle a bike-auto collision dispute.

Then, he has a couple more trials set for this month. “There’s a lot going on, so it’s fun,” he said. In fact, he said later, “I have two to three [trials scheduled] every month for the rest of the year.”

In the Tubbs Fire case, he represents a homeowner who discovered his insurance policy’s promise of “guaranteed replacement cost” actually limits the house replacement cost to just 200% of coverage in the event of a brush fire. Echeverria argued it is illegal in California to market a policy as providing guaranteed replacement cost if it includes a sublimit. Doyle v. National General Insurance Co. CIV1901919 (Marin Super. Ct., filed May 16, 2019).

In the auto-bike case, Echeverria said that by refusing to settle for the $25,000 policy limit and letting the dispute end in a $10 million judgment, the insurance company “opened up the policy, and they are responsible to pay for the entirety of the judgment, plus attorneys’ fees.” Simone v. State Farm Automobile Insurance Co., 20STCV14579 (L.A. Super. Ct., filed April 15, 2020).

Early this year, he reached an $8 million settlement on the eve of trial with Riverside County on behalf of the children of two of the men professional baseball player Brandon Martin murdered with a bat in 2015. The unusually complex case alleged the county wrongly released Martin from a 72-hour mental-health hold after 48 hours. He said the case “was like walking a minefield of immunity defenses.” Swanson v. County of Riverside, RIC1611766 (Riv. Super. Ct., filed Sept. 13, 2016).

As for his upcoming trials, “all I can do is prepare and do my job,” Echeverria said.

– Don DeBenedictis