State Court Issues Preservation Order Despite Some Overlap with Existing Federal Preservation Orders
Weiller v. New York Life Ins. Co., 2004 WL 3245345 (N.Y. Sup. Ct. Mar. 16, 2005) (Unpublished)
Plaintiff brought a putative class action in New York state court alleging that Unumprovident Corporation had engaged in an elaborate scheme to limit its liability to policyholders by denying meritorious claims based on economic factors having nothing to do with insureds’ actual qualifications under the policies. Plaintiff named Unumprovident as a defendant, as well as two other disability insurers. Eight other similar class actions are part of a Multi-District Litigation (“MDL”) pending in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Tennessee, Unum’s home venue. In addition, six pending securities class actions accuse Unum of implementing the decade long scheme and seek damages for Unum’s alleged failure to maintain sufficient reserves to account for any resulting liabilities. Other related class actions and derivative shareholder suits are also pending against the defendant based on similar claims. Preservation orders were entered in the MDL case and in Keir v. UnumProvident Corp., which required UnumProvident to preserve 25 categories of documents dating back approximately 10 years, including substantially all computer disks and drives, and email files. Read More