John Gibbons of Blank Rome LLP's insurance recovery practice beat an insurer's attempt to relitigate a yearslong coverage battle over underlying asbestos claims and defeated an insurer's bid to avoid covering defense costs over a company's sale of subsidiaries, landing him a spot among the 2025 Law360 Insurance MVPs.
His biggest accomplishment over the past year:
In a dispute dating back to 2010, Gibbons notched multiple wins for construction engineering and maintenance contractor Nooter LLC against Evanston Insurance Co. over underlying asbestos claims, first in Missouri state court and then in Missouri federal court.
In federal court, Evanston said the $60 million combined aggregate policy limit in Nooter's policies was exhausted and sought to obtain a court declaration it had no further coverage obligations over the underlying asbestos claims. But prior to that, a state court had determined Evanston owed a duty to defend Nooter, and a Missouri appeals court in October 2017 upheld a jury's verdict siding with Nooter over the company's breach of contract and "vexatious refusal to pay" claims.
In February, a unanimous three-judge appeals panel in the Eighth Circuit affirmed that the doctrine of claim preclusion applied to Evanston's federal action, which the panel said "prohibits a party from bringing, in a subsequent lawsuit, a claim that should have been brought in the first action."
"Back in 2010, Evanston had actually tried to take this from state court into federal court, and we succeeded in getting it moved back to state court the first time around before they tried to take it again," Gibbons told Law360.
With the state courts already having jurisdiction and hearing the coverage dispute, Gibbons said the idea of litigating in federal court after the state trial court went through "all the hard work" of ruling on coverage, holding a jury trial and issuing a declaratory judgment "just offends notions of justice and efficiency and everything you think about."
He said there are many reasons why insurers would prefer to litigate insurance coverage in federal court rather than state court, such as having a larger jury pool for a federal action than what's available for a dispute in state court.
"There are a lot of thoughts and theories as to how different courts may hear a case or resolve a case. I think that there can be a lot more overthinking on that," Gibbons continued. "You buy an insurance policy and you pay premiums and you expect to get coverage that you purchased. That's something that should resonate wherever you are, in any system."
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"MVP: Blank Rome's John Gibbons," by Ganesh Setty was published in Law360 on December 15, 2025.