Life Insurance Lawyer Serving Delaware

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Boonswang’s team of life insurance lawyers have decades of experience fighting for the rights of beneficiaries across the country.

People purchase life insurance policies to ensure the financial well-being of their beneficiaries. Policyholders expect that if they die within the policy term, their loved ones will receive the death benefit without a problem. 

Unfortunately for many life insurance beneficiaries, the process of getting a claim paid is rarely easy. There is a logical reason for this. Just like any other business, life insurance companies must make money for their shareholders and therefore prioritize their bottom line. They only make money when they collect premiums and delay or deny claims. For this reason, they expend a great deal of effort to deny or delay payment on valid life insurance claims. 

If your life insurance claim was denied or is being delayed, the DE life insurance lawyers at Boonswang Law can help you fight back and get your payout.

Our Delaware Life Insurance Lawyers Have Helped Beneficiaries from these Cities and the Surrounding Areas:

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Common Reasons for Life Insurance Claim Denials in DE

Retroactive Cancellation

When someone applies for life insurance, they complete an application and medical questionnaire and disclose facts such as age, weight, occupation, marital status, general health, medical conditions, and lifestyle habits like drinking alcohol or smoking. The life insurance company calculates the policyholder’s risk of dying within the policy term using the information the policyholder provides. Policyholders who are at greater risk of dying during the policy term pay higher premiums than those who are less at risk. 

If a policyholder makes a mistake or fails to disclose information, the life insurance company will allege that they misrepresented themselves in order to get a lower premium payment and then retroactively cancel the policy and deny your claim.

Call us if your claim was denied due to misrepresentation. We have gotten many of our clients paid when the life insurance company alleged the policyholder misrepresented themselves.

Call Boonswang Law Today to Talk with an Experienced Delaware Life Insurance Lawyer - Free of Charge!

You have been through enough, losing a loved one. Let us handle dealing with the life insurance company for you.

Boonswang Law has been helping life insurance beneficiaries throughout Delaware for decades. Our goal is to get you your entitled death benefits in a timely and efficient manner. 

Contact us today for your free, no-obligation consultation. We are ready to fight for you!

An Exclusion Applies

Every life insurance policy includes a list of causes of death not covered, called “exclusions.” For example, death due to self-inflicted injuries and death due to terorism or acts of war are common policy exclusions. 

A life insurance company will try to apply exclusion to deny your claim if there is even a remote possibility that exclusion applies to the policyholder’s cause of death. In these cases, we investigate and can often show that the exclusion does not apply, and we get our beneficiary clients paid.

Policy Lapse

In exchange for a policyholder’s premium payments, life insurance companies provide life insurance coverage. If a policyholder does not remit payment when due for any reason, life insurance coverage may lapse and terminate and the life insurance company will deny beneficiaries’ claims for death benefits.

Often this is not the end of the story, because beneficiaries frequently get their payout on lapsed policies. Every state including Delaware regulates the termination of life insurance coverage, and often life insurance companies and employers who provide group life insurance coverage to employees fail to follow those regulations, resulting in nonpayment of premiums that is not the fault of the policyholder.

If your claim was denied due to lapse, we may be able to get you paid. Call us to discuss your claim.

Insufficient Proof of Death

When a policyholder dies while traveling outside the U.S., life insurance companies generally delay payment of claims because of a delay in receiving a death certificate, or because a foreign death certificate contains insufficient information regarding the policyholder’s death.

If the life insurance company is delaying payment on your life insurance claim for this reason, contact us. We can help – and the life insurance company may owe you interest due to the delay!

What to Expect When You Work With the Delaware Life Insurance Lawyers at Boonswang Law.

You probably have never needed a life insurance lawyer before and you may not know what a life insurance lawyer can do for you to help you get your payout. Here’s what we do for our beneficiary clients, among other things:

  • We carefully review the policy terms to determine coverage and exclusions
  • We review the denial letter and any other correspondence you have received from the life insurance company 
  • We thoroughly investigate allegations made by the life insurance company in denying your claim
  • We negotiate with the life insurance company to get you a payout 
  • If necessary, we litigate your claim in court if the life insurance company refuses to pay 

You should know that all life insurance companies employ a team of experts, consultants, and lawyers whose priority is to look out for the companies’ profit margins. The more premiums a life insurance company collects and the fewer death benefit claims they pay out, the more profit they make for their shareholders. In other words, the interests of the life insurance company are at odds with yours and with the policyholder’s.

Don’t you need an experienced team on your side, too? Count on the Delaware life insurance lawyers at Boonswang Law to fight back to get you the death benefits you were meant to receive.

Frequent Delaware Life Insurance Claims Questions

How Can I Find Out if a Loved One Had Life Insurance?

If you suspect a loved one purchased a life insurance policy, you will have to investigate because there is no nationwide database of all policyholders. 

Try looking through contents of a safe-deposit box or your loved one’s desk drawers for policy documents. Also inspect your loved one’s recent mail for premium notices, and look for evidence of premium payments in your loved one’s bank account statements.

The life insurance company should pay you within 30-60 days of the day you submitted your claim for death benefits. 

If two months have passed and your claim has not paid out, contact us. When a life insurance company unreasonably delays payment on a life insurance claim, they may owe you interest on the death benefit.

You could take no for an answer, but why would you when hiring an experienced DE life insurance attorney is free of charge because we work on a contingency basis? Let us help you contest that denial. Why? Because life insurance companies frequently deny valid claims.

Perhaps, but you have to fight to get your payout.

We can help you contest the denial and will investigate why the lapse occurred. If the lapse was not the fault of the policyholder, it is possible to still get a payout if, for example, an employer failed to give the policyholder conversion papers or improperly administered the policy, or the life insurance company failed to send the policyholder any of the lapse notices required under the law.

Call our DE life insurance lawyers if your life insurance claim was denied due to lapse. We will investigate and get you paid if at all possible.

Only the policyholder can change their life insurance beneficiary designation. A person with power of attorney may change a beneficiary designation, but this is rare.

You need to know first that all life insurance policyholders can change their beneficiary designation any time they choose and to whomever they wish. However, if you suspect a fraudulent beneficiary change or a change made under duress, you can contest it. 

A beneficiary dispute is difficult to win. Contact an experienced life insurance beneficiary attorney for help.

No! A beneficiary designation change after the date of the policyholder’s death is fraudulent. Contact an experienced life insurance beneficiary attorney immediately.

A minor cannot directly receive life insurance death benefits. In these cases, a court has to appoint a conservator to administer the funds on behalf of the minor beneficiary. Unfortunately, there is little to prevent a conservator from using the funds for their own benefit.

If a policyholder wants a minor to receive the death benefit, they should consider setting up a trust with the minor as beneficiary of the trust. Then, name the trust as beneficiary of their life insurance policy. This way, they can select who will act as trustee. The person selected as trustee is a fiduciary to the minor thus obligating them to act in the minor’s best interest.

Yes, if the spouse or ex-spouse was supposed to be the named beneficiary for any reason and someone else was named. For example, some policyholders are under court order to designate their ex-spouse as beneficiary to insure support payments. Other policyholders have designated irrevocable beneficiaries and the life insurance company is supposed to block changes.  

Contact us if you were supposed to be a beneficiary on a life insurance policy but someone else was named instead – we can help you.

If the primary beneficiary died before the policyholder, the life insurance company pays the death benefit to the secondary beneficiary or the contingent beneficiary. If the policyholder failed to designate secondary or contingent beneficiaries, the death benefit pays to the policyholder’s estate.

Unfortunately, if the estate received the death benefit, those funds are subject to the claims of the policyholder’s creditors. To avoid this and make sure intended parties receive the whole death benefit, policyholders should keep their beneficiary designations current.