Hunton Insurance Recovery Blog

On August 29, 2017, my colleagues Lawrence J. Bracken, Michael Levine, and Geoffrey Fehling published an article in Law360 discussing the Ninth Circuit's recent decision rejecting coverage for the Los Angeles Lakers' director's and officer's (D&O) insurance claim arising from a fan's class action lawsuit under the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA), based on a broadly-worded invasion of privacy exclusion in the Lakers' D&O insurance policy. A split Ninth Circuit panel held that "[b]ecause a TCPA claim is inherently an invasion of privacy claim, [the insurer] correctly concluded that [the claimant]'s TCPA claims fell under the Policy's broad exclusionary clause." The full article is available here.

When faced with potentially problematic TCPA exclusions in many general liability policies, policyholders increasingly have sought coverage for TCPA claims under D&O and other policies. But why did the Lakers' D&O policy contain such a broad invasion of privacy exclusion in the first place? And how does the Ninth Circuit's ruling impact coverage for future TCPA lawsuits? The article seeks to answer these and other questions.