Court Opinion

ID: 9844529
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-09-24 03:04:17.606317+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T09:15:36.983484
License: Public Domain

MOLLOY, Judge
(dissenting from opinion on rehearing).
Though I agree that the motion referred to in Sandoval v. Chenoweth, 102 Ariz. 241, 245, 428 P.2d 98, 102 (1967), as the motion of the liability insurance company (“ --t= * * its motion * * * ”) was in fact a motion to set aside default filed in the name of the defendant Sandoval, I do not agree that our Supreme Court intended to adopt a rule that would permit a liability insurance company to advance its own equities, as opposed to those pertaining to *485its insured, under the auspices of a motion filed in the name of the insured.
I consider it critical to the Sandoval decision that the insurance company was itself a party to that litigation, and had filed a motion, in response to a tender of issue in a garnishment proceedings, which adopted by reference the motion to set aside default previously filed on behalf of its insured.1
Sandoval is authority for the proposition that a liability insurance company may appear in the litigation in which a default has been taken against its insured and show cause to set aside what is, in effect, under Sandoval, a default against it:
“If the insurance company can show statutory grounds to set aside the default, its remedy is to move to have the default judgment set aside, as was done in the instant case.”
102 Ariz. at 245, 428 P.2d at 102.
But, I see no intent in this opinion to permit an insurance company to advance its own excusable neglect to set aside a default against its insured. Such a rule would permit most inequitable results.
In the case at bar, for instance, if the previously released majority opinion is correct, and if the defendants’ failure to answer was negligent and otherwise inexcusable, it would be a strange law that would reclassify their failure as excusable because they were additionally negligent in failing to notify their insurance company.
And, as far as the insurance company is concerned, there may be many reasons, unexplored by this record, which would render its failure to answer on behalf of its insured negligent. In the record, we have an uncontroverted affidavit from a claims representative that the defendants Gardner did not inform him of the service of process, but there is no showing that the affiant’s knowledge constituted all of the knowledge that should be attributed to the liability insurance company, which presumably has many agents.
The motion to set aside was submitted on behalf of the “defendants Gardner.” In considering it, I believe we are concerned with the “mistake, inadvertence, surprise, and excusable neglect” of the parties on whose behalf it was made—not with possible excuses of an insurance company which has not as yet made itself a party to this litigation, so that we can evaluate its excuses in proper perspective. It is possible that we are dealing with a defense tendered under a reservation of rights which may later relieve the insurance company of all liability, or a policy with unusually low limits of liability, or, conceivably, even with an insurance company which is totally irresponsible financially.
In view of the ambivalence inherent in the situation of a liability insurance company’s representation of its insured, and the language of Sandoval, which in at least one of its pronouncements equated a motion to set aside default filed for the insured with one filed on behalf of the insurer, a motion to set aside now filed by the insurance company on its own behalf should not necessarily be regarded as tardy. But I do not think we should be concerned with its excuses, whatever they may be, in evaluating whether the defendants Gardner are entitled to have this default set aside as to them.

. This is not apparent from the opinion published, but is ascertainable by examining the abstract of record on file in the Supreme Court, at 21.