Supreme Court of Oklahoma, 1981

The court affirmed the jury’s actual- and punitive-damages awards and the attorney-fee award. It held that the insurer’s evidence and conduct supported the jury’s finding of unreasonable, malicious claim handling, rejected the insurer’s due-process challenge to the bad-faith tort, and reaffirmed that the tort applies…

The court held that it could not order the Bar Association’s prosecutorial arm to reinvestigate a grievance because doing so would compromise the court’s neutrality as the final adjudicator of bar discipline.