That doesn’t seem to be the case here.
The insured party and the plaintiff agreed to arbitration between themselves. GEICO wasn’t part of that. The arbitrator found in the plaintiff’s favour, then the plaintiff filed suit to enforce the arbitration award.
GEICO applied to intervene and the trial court granted the motion to confirm the arbitration award and entered judgment against the insured. After doing that, it granted GEICO permission to intervene.
The timing there is important.
According to the appeal judgment, by the time GEICO became party to the proceedings, they were stuck with the findings and outcome of the arbitration as confirmed by the trial court.
GEICO was still able to file various motions claiming that the arbitration was all a sham and a scam but the trial court denied those.
ETA:. The part I don’t quite get is how any of this means GEICO has to pay out. So far all we seem to have is a judgment between the Insured and M.O.
Is there not another step needed where M.O. has to try to get the money out of GEICO?
If so, is that not where GEICO get to argue that their insurance doesn’t cover this kind of claim? Which they do seem to be doing according to the article.
I’d like to see the “federal court papers” the article refers to but of course they don’t bother linking to them. It was bad enough tracking down the appeal ruling. At least there they told us which court the case was in.
Further edit:
All I can find is this:
which would seem to indicate that the federal stuff was dismissed on jurisdictional issues. But the article says the federal case is ongoing so either they appealed or filed again somewhere else.
