Many property insurance policies contain terms that prohibit assignment, but Florida law has long deemed those terms inoperative once a loss has occurred. E.g., W. Fla. Grocery Co. v. Teutonia Fire Ins. Co., 74 Fla. 220 (Fla. 1917). As a result, contractors who repair or remediate damaged property increasingly offer to accept assignments from policyholders in lieu of payment—a practice that gives them greater leverage in setting prices, because it enables them to back ... Keep Reading »
Looking Backward: West Virginia Retroactively Imposes Coverage for Faulty Workmanship
A notorious moving target in the field of coverage litigation is an insurer's responsibility under a commercial general liability policy for the policyholder's faulty workmanship. The key question is usually whether the defect in workmanship is an "occurrence" within the meaning of a policy; the answer can depend on which court you ask or how those courts deal with other policy terms. In 2013, West Virginia's highest court overruled its own precedents to hold that CGL ... Keep Reading »
Cybersecurity Coverage Litigation: Learning to Survive After the Second Wave Hits
It’s a familiar pattern. First, new risks inspire legislation and regulations that impose new penalties. Next, insurers and policyholders fight over whether the new liabilities are covered under traditional liability policies. Finally, insurers craft new coverages to define their obligations in the changed environment. See, e.g., DeMeo, Eldred, Utiger & Scruggs, "Insuring Against Environmental Unknowns," 23 J. Land Use & Envtl. L. 61, 62-65 (2007). In this ... Keep Reading »
Florida’s Immune System: No First-Party Bad Faith Claims Against The State-Created Property Insurer
Earlier this month, in Citizens Property Insurance Corp. v. Perdido Sun Condominium Association, Inc., No. SC14-185 (Fla. May 14, 2015), the Supreme Court of Florida held that the immunity from suit granted to Citizens under its enabling statute, Fla. Stat. § 627.351(6), applies to the cause of action for an insurer's first-party bad faith that was created by a different statute, Fla. Stat. § 624.155(1)(b). Because Florida does not recognize a common law cause of action ... Keep Reading »
Of Mice and Manpower: Companies That Lease Employees Cannot Be Self-Insured
In the recent California case of Kimco Staffing Services v. The State of California, the Court of Appeals for the 2nd Appellate District agreed with the lower court that staffing services that provide temporary service employees cannot self-insure their workers compensation liabilities. In making this decision, the Court rejected the plaintiff’s arguments that the State’s position of prohibiting self-insurance was a violation of equal protection. This litigation arose ... Keep Reading »
Wait A Minute, Mr. Postman: Tenth Circuit Applies Statutory-Violation Exclusion To Junk Fax Claims That Try To Skirt The TCPA
Enacted in 1991, the Telephone Consumer Protection Act, 47 U.S.C. § 227 (TCPA), inaugurated the era of "junk fax" class actions, in which recipients of mass fax advertisements may pursue statutory damages of $500 per class member. Insurers responded by adding terms to liability policies that expressly exclude coverage for claims under the TCPA. But the dialectic of coverage litigation is ineluctable, and plaintiffs began asserting, in effect, that the TCPA was ... Keep Reading »
Seeing the Finish Line: Courts Increasingly Exempt Claims-Made Policies from the Notice Prejudice Rule
In a majority of jurisdictions, the "notice-prejudice rule" provides that an insurer may not deny a claim on grounds of late notice without demonstrating prejudice. The rule is statutory in some states and judicially crafted in others. Most courts, however, also hold that the rule does not apply to late notice under a claims-made-and-reported policy, as opposed to an occurrence policy. In 2015, several cases have solidified this trend, and some of them actually extend ... Keep Reading »
Georgia Supreme Court: Insurer Did Not “Unreasonably” Withhold Consent to Settle
In Piedmont Office Realty Trust v. XL Specialty Insurance Co., No. S15Q0418 (Ga. Apr. 20, 2015), the Georgia Supreme Court reiterated that, in the face of a policy provision prohibiting the insured from unilaterally settling a claim, the insured may not enter into a settlement and then seek coverage or assert a bad faith claim. Piedmont, the insured, was named as a defendant in a federal securities class action. Its defense was covered under both a $10 million ... Keep Reading »
Coverage Not Limited to Schedule of Locations in Fight Over Dam Liabilities
In C. Brewer & Co., Ltd. v. Marine Indem. Ins. Co. of Am., No. SCWC-28958 (Haw. Mar. 27, 2015), the Supreme Court of Hawaii ruled that liability coverage is not limited to only those locations defined in an insurer's schedule of locations. The court found that because a causal connection could be established between the negligent decisions of a business proprietor and the liabilities stemming from those decisions elsewhere, coverage could be applied irrespective of ... Keep Reading »
Telematics and Usage-Based Insurance: Benefits, Challenges, and the Future
The NAIC's Center for Insurance Policy and Research (CIPR) released a white paper in March 2015 providing an excellent overview of the brave new world of automobile "telematics" data and their use in premium rate-making by auto insurance. Telematics allow for the measurement of actual driving habits, through remote access to a vehicle's real-time driving data. Thus, a driver's actual experience can be studied in data transmitted from, for example, the vehicle's ... Keep Reading »
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