As longtime practitioners of insurance law, the founders of Kantor & Kantor LLP in Northridge say they see a new subset about to take off.
Glenn Kantor, who with wife, Lisa Kantor, founded the insurance and ERISA — Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974 — firm in 2004, said he sees long term-care insurance as the next big niche specialty in insurance law. It’s reached a point where he’s started to dedicate attorneys to it and is considering expanding his firm.
“I anticipate a tsunami of these cases coming in,” Glenn Kantor said. “I handled a case in 2005. Over the years, I’ve handled more and more. It’s still a small percentage of our practice, but we’re seeing, consistently, more and more calls about this. We have shifted people to become experts on this area of law. We do anticipate a rise in these kinds of cases.”
Long-term care insurance, he explained, is relatively new compared to other sorts of insurance — medical and home, for example — and it really took off as an option in the 1990s. With those customers beginning to age into utilizing it, Glenn Kantor said insurance providers are now denying claims in larger amounts. Providers are also erroneously canceling policies, he claimed, based on a variety of errors.
That’s when attorneys like those at his firm come into play.
“It’s becoming a bigger and bigger part of our practice as more claims are made and denied,” he said. “The policies were sold 30 years ago to 50-year-olds and now these people are all turning an age when they need it.”
Recent Kantor & Kantor victories include prevailing on an appeal that forced Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield to pay for a client’s mental health treatment plan at a residential treatment facility for teenagers and winning an appeal for a client seeking disability benefits for developing hypersensitivity to light and noise following an auto collision in which she sustained a concussion.