Chris French has a new essay questioning the decision to file Covid 19 coverage suits in federal courts: Forum Shopping COVID-19 Business Interruption Insurance Claims. Chris summarizes the empirical support for the conventional wisdom that state courts are more favorable to policyholders than federal courts and asks why policyholder lawyers are nevertheless filing suits in federal court. Using CCLT data, he reports the number of business interruption claims in federal court (over 700 as of today) and the percentage of those that are filed as class actions (about 1/3). He suggests that policyholders would be better served by filing state-based class actions in state court. We have state court class actions in the CCLT database. Thus, one of the many questions that CCLT data will help answer is whether Chris French is right.
