Overview
For over twenty years, our attorneys have represented sureties on construction, development, fidelity, and other types of bonds and related issues, from resolving performance bond defaults to defending payment bond claims. We prosecute actions to enforce indemnity agreements, including prejudgment attachment of assets.
Surety and Fidelity Law
In 1986, Clark Fetzer joined Paul R. Howell and David L. Hughes to form Howell, Fetzer & Hughes, a construction and surety boutique firm in Salt Lake City that later opened an office in Santa Ana, California to service the firm’s surety clients, including United Pacific/Reliance Insurance Company. Since that time, Clark and others in the Surety and Fidelity Practice Group have handled a broad spectrum of surety matters for more than a score of bonding companies. Representative of those matters are:
- Highway contractor defaults on multiple contracts, including prosecuting assigned claims against public obligee and enforcing letter of credit in favor of surety
- Defending subcontract performance bond claim on highway project
- Developer bonds and improvement bonds
- Prosecuting surety’s claims against FDIC to enforce lender’s set aside letter
- Defending Miller Act and Little Miller Act claims
- Asserting discharge of surety for improper payments, cardinal change, default by obligee, and failure to tender balance of contract funds
- Defending surety bad faith claims on payment and performance bonds
- Actions on indemnity agreements, including claims for exoneration and quia timet and enforcement of collateral and books and records clauses
- Prejudgment attachments
- Salvage and collection