It has become commonplace for suits against insurers for denying coverage to include a claim under Connecticut’s Unfair Trade Practices Act ("CUTPA"). Typically, but not always, the alleged unfair trade practice is a violation of one or more subsections of Connecticut’s Unfair Insurance Practices Act ("CUIPA"), which does not itself allow for a private cause of action. In spite of the prevalence of these hybrid actions (commonly-referred to as “CUTPA/CUIPA” claims),1 it remained an open question whether an insured could sue an insurer under CUTPA without alleging a violation of CUIPA.
Happily, the law is now definitive and settled: In State v. Acordia, 310 Conn. 1, the Connecticut Supreme Court held: (1) that an insurer, or an insurance broker, may be sued under CUTPA for conduct that is related to the business of providing insurance only for conduct that violates one of the express statutory grounds listed CUIPA, and not for the alleged breach of a common-law duty; and (2) in the absence of an alleged violation of CUIPA, an insurance broker or insurance company may not be sued under CUTPA for conduct that is related to the business of providing insurance. (The latter holding resolved a split among Connecticut’s trial courts.)
Acordia involved a suit by the State against an insurance broker for its failure to disclose to its clients agreements that the broker had with five insurers to give them preferential consideration for placement in exchange for commissions. The State alleged that the agreements violated the broker’s common-law fiduciary duty to its clients and alleged a CUTPA violation on the basis of the alleged breach of that duty. The trial court found that the broker’s conduct did violate its common-law fiduciary duty to its clients and that this breach violated both CUTPA and CUIPA.2 See id. at 1, 11-14.
The Supreme Court reversed the trial court’s decision and directed judgment in favor of the defendant. See id. at 38. The Court first held that the language and “legislative history of CUIPA . . . demonstrates that the legislature intended to occupy the field of defining unfair insurance practices, thereby precluding courts from incorporating common-law principles as a basis for finding an unfair insurance practice.” Id. at 26. As such, the trial court improperly relied on the defendant’s breach of its common-law fiduciary duty to its clients as the basis for a CUIPA violation because CUIPA “specifically enumerates, in its twenty-two subdivisions, those practices that are defined as unfair insurance practices in this state. None of those subdivisions identifies breach of fiduciary duty as an unfair insurance practice, or otherwise suggests that a breach of fiduciary duty can give rise to an unfair insurance practice.” Id. at 26-27.3
Having concluded that the plaintiff had not alleged a cognizable CUIPA violation, the Court next held that “conduct by an insurance broker or insurance company that is related to the business of providing insurance can violate CUTPA only if it violates CUIPA . . . .” Id. at 27. After noting that the first prong of CUTPA requires proof that conduct “offends public policy as it has been established by statutes, the common law or otherwise[,]” the Court reasoned that “[b]ecause CUIPA provides the exclusive and comprehensive source of public policy with respect to general insurance practices, we conclude that, unless an insurance related practice violates CUIPA or, arguably, some other statute regulating a specific type of insurance related conduct, it cannot be found to violate any public policy and, therefore, it cannot be found to violate CUTPA.” Id. at 37. This holding was simply the logical extension of the Court’s decisions in Mead v. Burns, 199 Conn. 651 (1986), and Lees v. Middlesex Ins. Co., 229 Conn. 842 (1994), which “clearly held that, if a plaintiff brings a claim pursuant to CUIPA alleging an unfair insurance practice, and the plaintiff further claims that the CUIPA violation constituted a CUTPA violation, the failure of the CUIPA claim is fatal to the CUTPA claim.” Acordia, 310 Conn. at 31. In short, for conduct by an insurer or insurance broker related to providing insurance, there is no such thing as a “freestanding” CUTPA claim; any such claim must be based on a violation of CUIPA.

1The most common basis for such claims is an allegation of unfair claim settlement practices. See Conn. Gen. Stat. § 38a-816(6).

2The trial court’s decision contained a cryptic, one-sentence allusion that “nondisclosure . . . was ‘deceptive or misleading’ as those terms are used in CUIPA.” Acordia, 310 Conn. at 17. However, the Supreme Court determined, based on its reading of the trial court’s entire decision, that the “court improperly predicated its conclusion that the defendant violated CUIPA on the court’s determination that the defendant had breached a fiduciary duty owed to its clients.” Id. at 15.
3 The Court left open the question of whether insurance-related conduct that “violates a statute other than CUIPA . . . can be the subject of a CUTPA claim.” Id. at 34, n. 9 (emphasis in original). If, for example, insurance-related conduct violates a criminal statute, but not one of the subdivisions of CUIPA, it might still be possible to argue that such conduct constitutes a sufficient basis for a CUTPA/CUIPA claim. See id. (discussing State’s inadequately briefed claim that broker’s conduct violated Conn. Gen. Stat. § 53a-161). However, the tenor of the Court’s analysis – in particular that CUIPA was intended to occupy the field of illegal insurance practices – suggests that such an argument would fall on deaf ears.