Hunton Insurance Recovery Blog

Last week, my partner, Syed Ahmad, commented on some of the biggest insurance rulings of the year in a Law360 feature article that can be found here.  Among those decisions is USAA Texas Lloyd’s Co. v. Menchaca, where the Texas Supreme Court ruled that that policyholders may recover for bad faith in the absence of coverage under their policy.  Ahmad also discussed the Connecticut appeals court decision in R.T. Vanderbilt Co., Inc. v. Hartford Acc. And Indem. Co., and its ruling that insurers may not force policyholders to act as an insurer during policy periods in which insurance was not available.  Finally, Ahmad discussed the Third Circuit’s ruling in General Refractories Co. v. First State Insurance Co., where the court gave a broad meaning to the phrase “arising out of” such that an exclusion for claims arising out of asbestos was to be read more broadly than referring only to claims from exposure to asbestos in its raw mineral form.  Significantly, however, the broad interpretation pertained only to the phrase “arising out of” and not the operative term “asbestos.”