Hunton Insurance Recovery Blog

The California Supreme Court ruled that vertical exhaustion applied to determine how a policyholder could access its excess insurance policies. Montrose Chem. Corp. v. Superior Court, No. S244737 (Cal. Apr. 6, 2020). The case involved coverage for Montrose Chemical Corporation’s environmental liabilities at its Torrance facility under insurance policies issued from 1961 to 1985. Montrose and its insurers agreed that Montrose’s primary policies were exhausted but disputed the sequence in which Montrose could access the excess insurance policies.

Hunton Insurance attorneys Syed Ahmad and Geoffrey Fehling provided several updates on recent recall insurance disputes in the most recent edition of the Recall Roundup, posted on the Hunton Retail Law Resource Blog.

Hunton & Williams' insurance practice head, Walter Andrews, was quoted in a Law360 article yesterday regarding the confusion that is likely to result from a federal bankruptcy judge's decision in Rapid-American Corp. v. Travelers Casualty and Surety Co., where the court concluded that a majority of excess insurers owe no coverage to Rapid-American Corp. for underlying asbestos claims until the company exhausts the limits of its underlying primary and excess coverage through actual payment, not just accrued liability. According the Andrews, "the public policy clearly ...

Two of three of Rapid-American Corp.'s excess liability insurers do not have to respond to underlying asbestos claims unless and until all underlying coverage is exhausted by the payment of claims, says Judge Bernstein of the United States Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York in a June 7, 2016 decision. Rapid-American has been involved in asbestos litigation since 1974 and settled disputes with many of its underlying insurers, but an amount sufficient to reach its excess coverage policies has not yet been paid. Rapid-American argued that it was not necessary for the primary policies' underlying limits to be exhausted by actual payment before insurers' excess liability coverage attaches.

On May 27, 2016, the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington allowed a declaratory judgment action filed by the Seattle Times Company for excess coverage to proceed to trial despite the insurer's arguments that the underlying policies had not been exhausted.