A German insurer is suing its own defense lawyers, claiming their courtroom silence turned a $27,000 denied claim into a $92 million verdict.
Great Lakes Insurance SE filed the lawsuit on April 9, 2026, in the United States District Court for the Northern District of Oklahoma, naming the Tulsa-based law firm Doerner, Saunders, Daniel & Anderson, LLP and its managing partner, Michael S. Linscott, as defendants. The case centers on a single count of negligence, and no final determination has been made.
The story begins in 2019. Great Lakes had issued a commercial insurance policy to Harold Dean Gage, an owner/investor of an apartment complex. After a fire at the property on July 22, 2019, Gage filed a claim for approximately $27,000. Great Lakes denied it.
Gage sued the insurer on May 24, 2021, in Cherokee County, Oklahoma, alleging bad faith denial. He sought around $27,000 in direct damages and also requested punitive damages. Great Lakes brought in Linscott and Doerner to defend the case, with Linscott serving as lead trial counsel.
What happened next, according to the lawsuit, was a courtroom breakdown that insurers across the industry may want to study carefully.
The filing alleges that the opposing attorney, Richard Toon, ran a voir dire that went well beyond what Oklahoma law allows. Toon allegedly referred to prospective jurors by their first names more than 200 times, promoted their local businesses, chatted about fishing, complimented their character, argued facts of the case, and steered the panel toward a "sky's the limit" verdict. Throughout all of it, the lawsuit claims, Linscott sat silently by without making a single objection.
It did not stop there. The filing alleges that a jury instruction read at the start of voir dire described the matter, without qualification, as "an insurance company bad faith case" — language that, according to the lawsuit, was tantamount to a determination by the judge that Great Lakes had committed bad faith. Linscott allegedly either agreed to the statement or failed to challenge it, and then did not object when opposing counsel repeatedly attributed it to the judge during voir dire, opening statements, and summation.
Perhaps most striking, the lawsuit claims that even after the court granted a motion barring any mention of punitive damages during the first phase of trial, Linscott failed to object when opposing counsel urged jurors to "hit them where it hurts" and built an "us versus them" narrative pitting the local community against the foreign insurer.
After a three-day trial, the jury returned a verdict of $65,000,000 in actual damages and $27,426,640 in punitive damages — more than $92 million in total, on a claim that started at roughly $27,000.
When Great Lakes raised these issues in post-trial motions, the opposing side's primary response was that Linscott had failed to preserve the errors by not objecting at trial. Great Lakes ultimately settled the underlying case before judgment was entered, in an effort to limit the fallout.
The lawsuit now alleges that the defense it received fell below the acceptable professional standards that bind all attorneys, and that the damages Great Lakes suffered exceed $75,000.
For insurers managing high-stakes bad faith litigation, this case is a sharp reminder: the courtroom failures that matter most are sometimes the ones that never get said out loud.
