Hi guys, I’m in an unfortunate dispute with a former employer which is resulting in me taking them to the labour court in Geneva for abusive dismissal and payment of equity.
I had a Generali Fortuna cover in place so had assumed all the expenses would be taken care of (policy states up to 1million CHF) as the claim is solidly evidenced.
Wrong - it’s a been a nightmare. It took me 2 months of arguing to get them to acknowledge I had a claim and then since then two things have happened (1) they arbitrarily capped the hourly rate for the lawyer at 300CHF citing a vague T&C - if anyone can find a good lawyer in Geneva for 300/ hour please let me know (2) the sum at issue is quite large, they have then cited another arbitrary T&C saying that for claims above 300k they will then prorate the fees covered.
In effect they are now in a position oif saying they will only cover fees of 300CHF at a prorated rate of 30%.
I am as you can imagine more than unhappy about this - does anyone have any advice or similar experience.
My current thought is a complaint to FINMA and Swiss Insurance Ombudsman.
You can compain of course, but if I understood correctly you have started a legal procedure yourself and now want them to cover the costs. That’s not how a legal insurance works. In case you have any problem in this field, you contact the legal insurance first and they lead the rest.
Thanks, what happened was I notified them of the case in their form. They then spent two weeks telling me it was company law and not employment law when it was clearly not. When I finally managed to get to the management they then apologised and accepted it.
I had one case with Fortuna. A company did a terrible job working on my house, broke some pipes, installed something else than what was contracted.
Their lawyer was nice but pretty young and inexperienced. I had to do a lot of work to prepare the files and help her.
In the end they paid us what we could expect to get from the company instead of going to court (it was cheaper for them this way). I felt both happy for getting my money and unhappy that the bad guy could get away with it.
Any ways, I moved to the FRC/Kassensturz insurance afterwards, hoping that it would be better for next time (or never hopefully).
Legal insurance are essentially here in order to provide any court litigation by negotiating/dealing with the counterpart, otherwise they lose a lot of money by spending too much time on your case especially of the counterpart has a lawyer who give way too much useless paperwork by soliciting the judge for nothing (trust me I was a lawyer in divorced).
So basically they will “help” you but only by doing the absolute minimum.
By the way, I don’t know any lawyer in Geneva with less than an hourly rate of 400 CHF (this is the minima of the lawyer convention in Geneva). You can try to take someone in Vaud, they are cheaper (350 CHF).
I don’t have an objective opinion on legal protection insurance, firstly because I’ve never taken advantage of it (I’am able to defend myself or, if needed, I’ll ask a friend for advice if he has better knowledge in a specific field of law), secondly, because the feedback I’ve had is negative (the protection doesn’t really exist) or unsatisfactory (the protection covers up to a certain point, but at harsh rates, as in the example of this thread, which the insurance company agrees to mandate an external lawyer at X CHF per hour for a maximum of Y CHF in total).
So I would say that legal protection insurance is useless if you have a dispute that could cost several thousand francs. What will usually happen is a negotiation between your insurer and any other insurer or the opposing party. If no compromise can be found, your insurer will either let you down or tell you that you should have been more far-sighted and asked for advice before (e.g. you got ripped off).
Where I can see these insurances being useful is when you need advice for the future or on possible problems you might have, e.g. you want to quit your job, what are your obligations to your employer? Your insurer will be able to advise you based on your employment contract and job description. Another example: you want to end your lease. What are the conditions? Again, your insurer will be able to help you. So, yes, insurance is useful because it will cost you much less than a lawyer. But in the event of a dispute, I’m skeptical.
Nevertheless, I’ve had clients who wanted an amicable divorce and whose legal protection insurance agreed to cover the divorce costs up to X’000 CHF. My training supervisor agreed to this price, but of course it covered the bare minimum (very few lawyers would have agreed to this price).
Ask around if you know anyone who has coverage and if they’ve ever used it.
Feel free to correct me if I’m wrong of course. As I don’t really know this field.
This is the experience I’ve had with mine when I’ve had to use it against a former landlord who refused to free the rental deposit and wanted to bill me costs that were rightfully his to pay. The dispute ended with my insurance covering the bill and paying my ex-landlord, which was satisfactory to me.
The bill was only roughly 1kCHF. The risk I was seeing was that I couldn’t trust my ex-landlord to free the rental deposit and not come with more demands if I paid it. By having him get in an agreement with my insurer, that made the injured party if he did so my insurer, which was enough protection for me to feel confident with the deal. My moral pleasure is that my ex-landlord hired a lawyer to deal with this and it’s very possible that his own legal costs rendered the whole thing financially moot for him.
The insurance has been very clear that covering a litigation was not their goal, but mitigating/negating the financial impact of the case on me was it. My feeling from our contacts is that they really didn’t fight for me at all and wouldn’t have covered much, if anything, of an actual litigation if it had come to there. They did protect my financial interests by taking up the bill themselves and prevented me from having to deal with a person I was very, very, very tired of by that point so the mental relief was worth quite a bit to me (also someone ready to hire a lawyer over a 1kCHF dispute is a kamikaze/berzerker and that’s not the kind of person I want to have to try and reason with).
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