Legal Insurance - Generali trying to pay as little as possible

Banks, Insurances & Third Pillar
1

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.

Thanks for your thoughts

2

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.

4

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.

5

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).

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6

I am sorry for you.

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).

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