Hudson Insurance alleges Progressive quietly let a $500,000 settlement offer expire - then watched a jury return a $1.37 million verdict.
That, in essence, is the story Hudson lays out in a lawsuit filed on May 5, 2026 in the US District Court for the Southern District of Florida. The umbrella carrier is going after Progressive Select Insurance Company for what it describes as bad faith claims handling, asking the court for $857,342.50 - the slice of an underlying judgment that landed on Hudson's excess layer.
The backstory, according to the filing, is straightforward. On February 8, 2022, Progressive's insured, Gregory Oberting, rear-ended Lloyd McVey in Lantana, Florida, while driving a Porsche Panamera. Progressive sat on the primary auto policy with a $500,000 bodily injury limit. Hudson sat above it with a $1 million personal umbrella - a policy the complaint says was "specially written to be excess of the personal automobile liability coverage" provided by Progressive.
Here is where things get uncomfortable for the primary carrier, at least as Hudson tells it.
McVey served a Proposal for Settlement on November 3, 2022, seeking Progressive's full $500,000 in limits. According to Hudson, no one at Progressive flagged it to the excess carrier. By the time the proposal expired on December 3, 2022, Hudson says, it had no idea the offer had ever been on the table - and no chance to push for acceptance, kick in money, or otherwise help steer the case away from the umbrella layer.
What followed, per the lawsuit, was a string of conservative moves by Progressive. In March 2023, with McVey already diagnosed with a C6-C7 disc herniation and recovering from an anterior total cervical disc replacement, Progressive authorized a $175,000 counter-proposal - roughly $45,000 above the plaintiff's medical bills. McVey rejected it.
By the July 2023 mediation, McVey's demand had climbed to $1.5 million. Progressive countered at $250,000, even though, Hudson alleges, it had pegged the claim's value at $275,000 just days earlier. Defense counsel's own reasonable verdict range topped out around $400,000, with a high-end estimate reaching $700,000.
The case went to trial in May 2024. As the jury began deliberating, plaintiff's counsel floated a high-low agreement of $500,000 to $1,500,000. Hudson says it was willing to accept to shield its insured. Progressive declined, the complaint states, and made no further offers.
The jury returned a $1,370,000 verdict on May 17, 2024. Final judgment of $1,357,342.50 followed on July 11, 2024, with attorney's fees awarded to McVey under Florida's offer-of-judgment statute. The case was resolved in August 2024, with Hudson contributing the amount above Progressive's limits while reserving its right to pursue the primary carrier.
For claims professionals, Hudson's account - which Progressive has not yet had a chance to answer, and which a court has yet to weigh - reads like a checklist of where primary-excess relationships can go sideways: keeping excess carriers in the loop on within-limits demands, taking your own defense counsel's verdict ranges seriously, and treating high-low offers as more than a formality when an excess hit is in play.
The allegations have not been tested in court. Progressive has not yet filed a response, and no ruling has been issued.
