Time limits for claiming against your insurer

Most insurance policies will provide fairly short time limits for lodging your claim with your Insurer and will, in addition, provide short time limits within which to sue your Insurer should your Insurer reject your claim. The time limits vary from policy to policy and can even vary in the same policy depending on the type of claim. For example, one widely used policy gives you 30 days to lodge most claims but only 7 days in the event of a hijacking claim. If the Insurer declines the claim, this same policy gives you 3 months from the date the claim was declined to sue the Insurer.

If you have missed the boat either by lodging your claim late or by taking too long to consult your Attorney with a view to challenging the Insurer's decision, it is sometimes possible to nevertheless salvage the situation and succeed with the claim against your Insurers. This is especially so if the time limit you have missed relates to late notification and you can show that your Insurer has not been prejudiced by the delay. It is much more difficult to salvage the situation if you have missed the time limit for challenging your Insurer's rejection of your claim. Here you would need to convince the Court that the particular time limit in the insurance policy is unconstitutional. This is no easy task. The Constitutional Court has made it clear that its starting point is to accept that a short time limit for challenging a rejection of a claim is normally reasonable and constitutional (the Constitutional Court decided this in 2007 in the context of a 90-day time limit). It is then up to you to convince the Court that in your particular case, given your particular circumstances, the time limit was unreasonably short. Incidentally, in the 2007 case, the Constitutional Court found that special circumstances had not been proved and the Court was not prepared to regard the 90-day time as unconstitutional even though the insured had been successful against the Insurer on this issue before the Supreme Court of Appeal.

It is an extremely risky and expensive business to end up getting involved in complicated constitutional issues over time limits in your insurance policy. To avoid this, it is important to be aware of the time limits and to make sure you lodge your claim with your Insurer without delay. If your Insurer rejects your claim and you feel the rejection is wrong or unfair, it is important that you immediately consult your Attorney. If you spend a lot of time arguing with your Insurer and trying to persuade them to back down on their rejection of your claim, you could well end up missing the boat and forfeiting your right to challenge your Insurer in Court.

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