Kantzelis v. The Commerce Insurance Company (Lawyers Weekly No. 09-045-17)
1 COMMONWEALTH OF MASSACHUSETTS SUFFOLK, ss. SUPERIOR COURT CA No. 16-3144-BLS1 ALEX KANTZELIS, on behalf of himself and all others similarly situated, vs. THE COMMERCE INSURANCE COMPANY MEMORANDUM OF DECISION AND ORDER ON DEFENDANT’S MOTION TO STRIKE CLASS ALLEGATIONS In this action, the plaintiff, Alex Kantzelis, asserts claims arising out of the defendant, The Commerce Insurance Company’s (Commerce), failure to make payments directly to a secured lender that financed the plaintiff’s purchase of his automobile after Commerce denied coverage for the plaintiff’s collision claim because of misrepresentations in the plaintiff’s application for insurance. He brings this action on his own behalf as well as on behalf of a putative class of similarly situated Commerce insureds. The operative complaint governing the plaintiff’s claims is his Third Amended Class Action Complaint (the Complaint). The original complaint was filed on October 13, 2016. It was amended once as a matter of right and once with Commerce’s assent. Commerce answered this second amended complaint, and also moved to dismiss on the grounds that the plaintiff lacked standing to bring the claims he asserted because he had suffered no damages. At a hearing on that motion, the court noted that the plaintiff’s contention that his debt to the finance firm that financed his purchase of the car would have been extinguished if Commerce had paid 2 the secured lender, as it was allegedly required to do under the insurance policy, was not supported by the policy language—if Commerce paid the loss to the lender it would be substituted as the creditor for the amount of the loss so paid.1 The court went on to comment that it was conceivable that a person in the plaintiff’s position might have suffered some other loss because Commerce did not pay the lender, for example if the car was repossessed and this caused consequential damages to the insured. Plaintiff’s counsel suggested that he could allege these kinds of special damages. The court gave the plaintiff an opportunity to file the third amended complaint, which, as noted above, is now the operative complaint in this case. The case is now before the court on Commerce’s “Motion to Strike Class Allegations.” Commerce contends that because the plaintiff’s claims rest on his allegations of special consequential damages unique to him, they cannot be the predicate for class-based claims. Whether such a motion to strike may be brought under Massachusetts jurisprudence is a question of first impression and discussed below. Of course, a denial of this motion would not be tantamount to the certification of a class, the plaintiff would still have to move for class certification under Mass.R.Civ.P. 23 and provide evidentiary support for class treatment. Rather, the practical issue raised by […]