If you want to win a bad faith case, you better hire attorneys that are contenders and not pretenders. Bad faith cases are not easy, and the term is overused by those ignorant on the topic. Larry Bache told me a story about a relatively new attorney from another firm on the speaking circuit who has never tried a bad faith, much less a complete insurance breach of contract case, who was pontificating about bad faith in an effort to make cases rain to his firm. Those are pretenders.

The first bad faith trial I was in was representing an adjuster who allegedly asked the local minister in a small town where "the owner who burnt down his store was located?" Forty years ago, when I first started my career, I represented insurance companies. We won that case. My first mentor, Paul Butler, gave a closing statement that had the jury in tears. The minister left the courtroom not to return for the verdict after all the evidence was fully disclosed.

I was thinking about those two memories while reading a recent ruling in an Oklahoma hail damage case where bad faith was alleged.1 The judge's Order recited the facts: