Hunton Insurance Recovery Blog

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.