Judges - 201x - LC - Walker v LSW, Life Insurance Company of the Southwest

  • THE COURT (Judge Selna): But you're assuming that we have to have particularized expectations.
    • If a fact would be material if disclosed, I think it gets around the necessity of what the individual expectations were.

DOC 820 - Trial Transcript - Day 11 - 279p

  • (p28) - The Court (Judge Robert N. Block): We Project That 90 Percent Of Our Customers After 10 Or 15 Years Are Going To Realize -- Are Going To -- When They See The Current Projection, They're Going To Say, We Don't Want This Insurance Anymore. And There Isn't Going To Be Any Cash Surrender Value Left Or Something --
  • (p48) - THE COURT: All Right.  I don't like that argument.  You got another one.

2011 0830 - DOC 104 - Discovery Conference - TRANSCRIPT for proceedings - 130p

  • (p21) - THE COURT (Judge Selna): Suppose I'm Henry Ford, and I market my first automobile, and I give a ten-year warranty. I'm going to guarantee this for ten years. Now, it's the first automobile. Is it fraudulent and misleading to say no one has ever gotten a whole life of a ten-year warranty?
  • MR. BROSNAHAN: In that hypothetical, he is guaranteeing the warranty. It doesn't matter whether anyone -- in this instance, these benefits -- the only reason that they are even in the illustration is that LSW has deemed them to be current. They have no marketplace reality whatsoever, and they're not guaranteed.
  • THE COURT: Well, that can't be so. Doesn't an efficient market price in all the future events as they affect the investment decision today?

2012 0918 - DOC 335 - TRANSCRIPT for proceedings - 68p

  • (p25-26) - The Court (Judge Robert N. Block): -- I mean, I should tell both sides that, one of the reasons I found this case and this dispute interesting is because I, you know, in my own personal life I had dealings with insurance policies and whole life policies.
    • And recently I exchanged a whole life policy that I -- by my calculation would lapse at some point in the future for a better product, and I did a 1035 exchange.
    • So, these are issues that I am very familiar with.  And I was once upon a time in my youth convinced to buy a whole life policy thinking it was going to be -- or not thinking -- with the hope that it would be fully paid up after a certain number of years of payments, premium payments, but well aware that if the return rates changed and the market  conditions changed, that might not come -- my hopes might not be realized.
  • Mr. Shapiro:  ...but they have the so-called vanish date.
  • The Court (Judge Robert N. Block): …and, in fact, they weren't on that particular policy. 
    • And, then, that's what triggered further inquiry as what are the current projections, what is -- you know, when would the policy lapse if I continued just to borrow the premiums against the policy. And, no, that's sooner than I would want.
    • And is there another product out there I could do a tax rate exchange for.
    • So, these are issues that I understand.
    • I don't know if that makes me less or more or at all sympathetic to the plaintiffs because I, myself, didn't feel like I’ve been defrauded.
    • I wish I hadn't bought it, but I didn't feel like I have been defrauded.  So --

2011 0830 - DOC 104 - Discovery Conference - TRANSCRIPT for proceedings - 130p

  • Plaintiffs wrongly accuse the court of speculating about agent disclosures.
    • What the court concluded was that the non-uniform sales process inherently defeats Plaintiffs’ class-wide omission theory. ER791 49:11-50:3.
    • The trial record supports that conclusion, and is dispositive. See Kaldenbach v. Mutual of Omaha Life Ins., 178 Cal. App. 4th 830, 847-848 (2009)

http://lswclassaction.com/docs/download/SANFRAN-%238165194-v1-2016_02_08_042_Appellees_Answering_Brief.pdf - <Bad Link>