Hunton Insurance Recovery Blog

Recently, a New York appellate court issued a decision that largely was a win for the National Football League (NFL) and similarly situated policyholders. The decision addressed several questions related to liability policies, including when an injury is accidental, when repeated injuries constitute continuous exposure to harmful conditions, when coverage is triggered under the products-completed operations hazard, and when a settlement should be deemed reasonable.

Listeria is a bacterium that can infect humans and cause intestinal illness and other harm. So when might listeria not qualify as a “communicable disease” under an insurance policy? According to a federal court in Oregon, the answer may turn on an exclusion for “any infectious and/or contagious disease[.]” (emphasis added). In Scottsdale Insurance Co. v. Bruce Packing Co., the policy’s use of the conjunctive and disjunctive “and/or” rendered the exclusion ambiguous and, thus, inapplicable to a lawsuit alleging bodily injury from listeria.

The decision is a useful reminder that coverage exclusions and limitations must be written clearly and precisely and that a failure to do so may render them inapplicable.

New Jersey has some of the strongest consumer-protection laws in the nation. The state’s courts, however, had created judicial carve-outs for professionals and semi-professionals, exempting them from liability under those laws. Those carve-outs expressly included insurance brokers, whom the courts classified as semi-professionals.

That changed in Lowe v. Audet.

A coverage extension ordinarily does what its title suggests: it extends coverage beyond the standard policy form. But what happens when an insurer tries to use an insurance extension to exclude coverage? That was the question in Parsons v. Crum & Forster Specialty Insurance Company, in which the Indiana Court of Appeals held that the same principles limiting broad pollution exclusions also apply when an insurer invokes a pollution coverage extension to narrow coverage. The result was a significant victory for the policyholder.