Like insurance companies, plaintiffs’ class action attorneys do better when they know how to manage risk. Bringing a case to trial can involve an enormous investment of time and resources, and most firms can’t afford to do it if there’s a significant chance the defendant will not be entitled to liability coverage at the end of the day. For that reason, avoiding an early resolution of coverage issues can sometimes help an insurer negotiate a more favorable settlement. ... Keep Reading »
Duty to Indemnify
In Faulty Workmanship Cases, Insuring Clause Dogs are Wagged by Exclusion Tails
In Greystone Const., Inc. v. National Fire & Marine Ins. Co., 661 F.3d 1272, 1289 (10th Cir. 2011), the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit articulated an important rule for construing commercial general liability policies: [A] CGL policy ‘begin[s] with a broad grant of coverage, w[hich is then limited in scope by exclusions. Exceptions to exclusions narrow the scope of the exclusion and . . . add back coverage. But it is the initial broad grant of ... Keep Reading »
Too Much of a Good Thing: Household Product Triggers Pollution Exclusion, Because “Quantity Matters”
Pollution exclusion clauses began appearing in commercial general liability policies when federal laws began making businesses liable for the cost of massive environmental clean-ups—like the remediation of “Volatile Organic Compounds” that was recently at issue in Chubb Custom Ins. Co. v. Space Systems/Loral, Inc., No. 11-16272 (9th Cir. March 15, 2013). A recent Colorado case presented the issue of when the grease that goes into your bacon double cheeseburger becomes a ... Keep Reading »
In the Last Frontier, Insurers Shouldn’t Leave Defendants Out in the Cold
An Alaska politician once said of the folks she grew up with, "We grow good people in our small towns, with honesty and sincerity and dignity." But those virtues don’t exactly leap out of the story behind Williams v. Geico Cas. Co., No. S–14089 (Alaska Jan. 25, 2013), which mostly has to do with alcohol, selfishness and stupidity. At the climax of this sordid tale, a party to the lawsuit argued that an insurer’s refusal to offer policy limits for a release of only one ... Keep Reading »
Federal Court Refuses to Let Insured Shoot First, Seek Coverage Later
at Sandy Hook Elementary School, the issue has been taken up passionately by both sides of the dispute over gun violence. Did the murderers in Newtown and Aurora kill in large numbers because they were able to fire many shots quickly, and without reloading, as Sen. Lautenberg believes? Or, as a Wall Street Journal editorial recently suggested, can the proliferation of mass killings be more reasonably attributed to the practice of designating “gun-free zones” in ... Keep Reading »
If a Tree Falls, and No Court Held an Insurer Must Defend It, Is There a Breach of Contract?
A liability carrier claims a policy does not require it to defend a particular lawsuit. A federal district court agrees, and the insurer stops providing a defense. Five years later, a Court of Appeals reverses. Did the insurer breach its insurance contract? In what appears to be a case of first impression, a federal court in California has said “no,” because holding otherwise would “tip the scales too far in favor of the insured.” ... Keep Reading »
Excess is Enough: Courts Decline to Expand Liability of Excess Insurers
Judicial opinions that purport to construe “the policy as a whole” are often bad news for insurers, but two recent decisions used that analysis to defeat plaintiffs with novel arguments for making their excess insurers liable for losses within the primary layer. Intel Corp. v. American Guarantee & Liability Insurance Co., No. 692, 2011 (Del. Sept. 7, 2012), arose out of antitrust litigation against the chip manufacturer, in which Intel paid more than $50 million ... Keep Reading »
A Porous Border: Insurers Finding it Hard to Exclude Coverage for Additional Insureds
Landlords and tenants, contractors and sub-contractors, even fathers and sons often establish relationships that make one party potentially liable for the acts of the other. One way to manage the risk these relationships create is for one party to add the other to its liability insurance policy as an additional insured. On the other side, insurers try to limit their exposure to additional insureds by defining coverage in a way that applies only to risks the additional ... Keep Reading »
The Limits of the Real: Narrow Readings of Policy Terms put Losses in a Virtual Realm
Ludwig Wittgenstein famously declared that “[t]he world is everything that is the case.” In three recent cases involving liability policies, courts remind us that injury can occur beyond the limits of the world that consists of “property”—or even of “substance.” 1. PPI Technology Services, L.P., was hired to “assist in well-planning” on three oil leases in Boudreaux, Louisiana. Its responsibilities included overseeing the drilling of wells. When PPI dug an empty ... Keep Reading »
Reservation of Rights can put Insurers on the Hook for Cost of Independent Counsel
When a liability insurer provides a defense subject to a reservation of rights, it seeks to preserve its own rights, while avoiding prejudice to the insured in the underlying claim. If the insurer ultimately wins the coverage battle, it can try to recover the cost of the defense it provided. Whether it can succeed is a question that different states answer in a wide variety of ways. In New York, insurers can recoup defense costs by establishing a lack of coverage. ... Keep Reading »
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