Hunton Insurance Recovery Blog

As artificial intelligence (AI) continues to revolutionize the business landscape, its associated risks are becoming more complex, widespread, and consequential. While the insurance industry determines the precise circumstances in which insurance may cover these risks, businesses should consider the complementary benefits of indemnification agreements as gap fillers.

In a recent client alert, Hunton Andrews Kurth LLP real estate attorney Laurie Grasso and insurance attorneys Geoffrey B. Fehling, Cary D. Steklof, and Evan J. Warshauer discuss the important lesson real estate companies and their officers and directors can take away from the Illinois federal district court’s decision in Old Guard Insurance Company v. Riverway Property Management, LLC et al., No. 1:23-cv-01098 (C.D. Ill. Sep. 6, 2024). The court found a commercial general liability insurer had no duty to defend or indemnify a property management company or its owner in lawsuits that included allegations of intentional conduct, holding that the allegations did not fall within the policies’ definition of occurrence, which required “an accident.”

This summer, in Yacullo v. AIG Property Casualty Company, the United States District Court for the Southern District of California held that an insurer’s violations of the state’s insurance regulations “is a factor that may be considered by a jury” in determining whether the insurer acted in bad faith. The case should serve as an important reminder to policyholders to carefully consider state-specific insurance regulations when asserting a bad faith insurance coverage claim against their insurers.

Boston-based partner Geoffrey Fehling was recently sworn in as a member of the Town of Wellesley Historical Commission. The Commission was created to preserve and protect the town’s tangible evidence of the architectural, aesthetic, cultural, economic, political and social history.