Anne Arundel jury awards $500K in insurance agent malpractice suit

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An Anne Arundel County jury awarded half a million dollars to a man struck by an underinsured driver for a claim of malpractice against his insurance agent.

A jury for the Anne Arundel County Circuit Court last month found Nancy Eichhorn did not exercise reasonable care as an insurance agent for Jeffrey Beahm, awarding Beahm $76,000 in past medical bills and $424,000 in noneconomic damages.

Beahm filed suit against Eichhorn and another insurance agent in January 2022 after collecting $30,000 from an underinsured driver who struck Beahm as a pedestrian, according to Mark Rosasco, counsel for Beahm. The court dismissed the other insurance agent as a defendant prior to trial, as Eichhorn owned the insurance agency, Rosasco said.

According to the complaint, Beahm claimed Eichhorn committed insurance agent malpractice by failing to properly complete insurance forms when she rewrote Beahm’s motor vehicle personal policy to a business policy and assured Beahm the change would not affect his coverage.

As a result of the policy rewrite, Beahm’s insurance company maintained that the failure to include Beahm as an insured on the policy means he is not entitled to coverage for the accident, for which he sustained serious injuries and continues to suffer some cognitive issues. According to the complaint, Beahm’s insurance company said Beahm’s name needed to appear with his business name for coverage to extend to him.

Beahm is self-employed and the sole employee of a company that provides computer hardware services.

“Nancy Eichhorn just refused to admit that she had made a mistake and felt that she could talk her way out of it,” Rosasco said. “Her testimony was not credible and the jury found she did not fulfill her duty of reasonable care to Jeffrey Beahm.”

In a motion for summary judgment, Eichhorn argued there was no evidence that she improperly completed the insurance forms for Beahm’s insurance policy. Eichhorn also contended she could not add Beahm as a named insured to his business’s commercial auto policy because he was not a vehicle owner.

In the same motion, Eichhorn argued Beahm said during his deposition that he never asked her to add him as a named insured to his commercial auto policy, and even if he had, Eichhorn could not have accommodated his request because the vehicles for Beahm’s company were not titled in his name.

Counsel for Eichhorn did not respond to requests for comment, but have filed a notice of appeal to the Maryland Appellate Court.

Rosasco said Beahm’s insurance policy renewed more than a dozen times before his accident occurred, yet Eichhorn did not inform Beahm about the option of a non-owner policy, which Rosasco said could have covered Beahm as a pedestrian.

“Every renewal was a chance for her to point this out to him and offer him the additional coverage,” Rosasco said.