Hunton Insurance Recovery Blog

A recent summary judgment order is a reminder that, in insurance coverage disputes, straightforward arguments can still win the day. In a coverage action arising from dozens of underlying personal injury suits, the court adopted a clear, text-based approach to the duty to defend—and ordered the insurer to provide a defense.

The ongoing military action between the U.S., Israel, and Iran is affecting commerce both in the region and globally. There have already been reports of several oil tankers, cargo vessels, and a data center being damaged in attacks. Even businesses not directly impacted will be affected as shipping companies avoid the Strait of Hormuz, causing delays and higher prices for downstream customers. While many might assume insurance coverage is unavailable, that is not always the case and knowing where to look is key.

In the case The Estate of Gene B. Lokken v. UnitedHealth Group, Inc., No. 23-CV-3514 (JRT/SGE) (D. Minn.), the plaintiffs alleged that the defendant insurer had denied claims using an artificial intelligence program without human review. They sought discovery into the insurer’s use of AI. When the insurer refused, they moved to compel and the Minnesota federal court granted the motion. Although this case deals with health insurance, its principles are widely applicable to all other types of insurance. Insurers are increasingly using AI to evaluate or even deny claims without human review. They also use it to challenge policyholders’ expenses as too high. Courts are beginning to allow discovery into how AI was used in the claim process. Accordingly, requests for AI chat files, use policies, and documents concerning oversight of AI should now be a standard part of every policyholder’s discovery requests in coverage litigation.

As conference and national tournaments approach for various sports, college athletics are entering a financially volatile stretch of the year. Individual investors and NIL collectives are preparing to make significant investments to build next year’s rosters and secure talent from transfer portals. With those investments, however, comes a substantial risk of loss. The risk of athlete injury looms larger than most. A season‑ending injury can derail not only a team’s performance, but also the financial expectations tied to an injured athlete. That uncertainty can, in turn, discourage future NIL investments. Booster insurance has emerged as a tailored solution to address this exact risk.

Colleges and universities have long sat at the crossroads of freedom of expression and societal change. As campus activism surges, they face growing pressure to protect their institutional missions while upholding students’ individual rights in an era of heightened scrutiny.

Higher education institutions are navigating an increasingly complex and high-visibility risk landscape. Today’s colleges and universities are not only centers of academic inquiry—they are also large employers, property owners, event venues, research enterprises, and, at times, the epicenter of national social and political debate. As a result, campus issues that might once have been handled internally by college or university leadership can now escalate quickly into litigation, regulatory scrutiny, reputational harm, and significant insurance claims. The stakes are high.

In the rarely litigated space of cyber insurance, the Northern District of Texas issued a win for cyber policyholders this week, offering a clear reminder to insurers that if they want to restrict coverage, they must draft the policy to clearly do so.

Wildfires continue to present serious risks for California property owners. Unfortunately, commercial property owners, corporate facilities, landlords, and homeowners need to overcome not only the flames themselves, but also remediating hazardous contamination against a backdrop of unpredictable and ambiguous environmental safety standards. In response to the destructive Los Angeles area fires in 2025, the California Legislature recently introduced Assembly Bill 1642 aimed at creating uniform science-based standards for evaluating, testing, and clearing wildfire-impacted properties.

A Feb. 17 federal court ruling has found that neither the attorney-client privilege nor work product protection apply to a criminal defendant’s self-directed prompts and large language model outputs.  In the ruling in USA v. Heppner, US District Judge Jed S. Rakoff ordered the production of 31 documents generated by the defendant using Anthropic’s Claude, notwithstanding that the defendant had incorporated information obtained from counsel and later shared the AI outputs with his attorneys. In a recent legal update, Hunton partner Meghan Podolny and associate Jessie Purtell discuss how the ruling provides early judicial guidance on privilege issues related to AI-generated materials, an area with limited existing case law.

Although the ruling occurred in a criminal proceeding, the reasoning should apply equally across all litigation.  The ruling could therefore have serious implications for policyholders in coverage litigation and mandates a cautionary approach to client-guided “research” using open ai models.

In a recent opinion addressing cross‑motions for summary judgment, a Pennsylvania state court set forth a clear holding that policyholders may recover post-judgment interest under excess liability insurance policies only when the policy language expressly says so—and only when the stated conditions are met. The decision underscores the importance for policyholders to thoroughly examine the defense and payment provisions outlined in their insurance policies.