The monetary size of claims also rose steeply over the same period, by 73%.
Mr. Smarr said the size of claims paid out had been increasing for a decade, noting that according to the association's database of 180,000 claims, the average payout increased 6.8percentt a year in the 1990's.
It was a death spiral .The cost of litigation and size of claims have mounted steadily over decades, but in the post-Enron era both have "spiked like a hockey stick," says Bill Parrett, boss of Deloitte in America.
The ruling, by the European court of justice, means insurers will no longer be able to use sex as a factor to determine whether someone represents a bigger risk in insurance terms, even though historical evidence shows that being male or female has a bearing on frequency and size of claims.
Because Aflac is not a property insurer like Chartis, Tokio Marine or others still trying to gauge the size of claims from the quake, tsunami and nuclear disaster that the Japanese government will ultimately help cover, Aflac's business has been only minimally affected by the calamity.
Authors' response: We suppose that the size of claims is in the eye of the beholder, but several times in this reply we have emphasized that our claims are really very modest, and that instead you have several times imputed claims to us that we either do not make, or do not intend to make.
The cost of issuing a writ in the small-claims court varies between £10 and £80 depending on the size of the claim.
The size of her claim is being assessed.
The size of the claim has not been decided.
The size of the claim is not untypical for civil suits in the United States.
