The Biggest Property & Casualty Insurance Decisions of 2018
Insurance attorneys received guidance from courts on a host of critical coverage issues in 2018, including the New York high court's holding that an insurer cannot be held liable for a policyholder's cleanup costs for years in which no pollution insurance was available and two appeals courts' rulings that insurers must cover losses from email-based scams.
Here, Law360 reviews the biggest insurance decisions of the year.
KeySpan v. Munich Re
Blank Rome LLP associate Kyle Brinkman, who represents the policyholders, said the decision could greatly increase insureds' financial exposure to environmental and other types of long-tail claims. Without an unavailability exception, a policyholder's share of long-tail liabilities will continue to increase as more years pass from the point at which insurance companies stopped offering applicable coverage, he said.
"That poses a significant detriment to insured's ability to recover," Brinkman said.
[...]
Phishing Coverage Rulings
According to Brinkman, insurers may respond to the twin policyholder-friendly decisions by either raising premiums for computer fraud coverage or rewriting their policies to explicitly bar coverage for phishing-related losses.
"Decisions on modern coverage issues tend to have a shorter shelf life," Brinkman said.
"The Biggest Property & Casualty Insurance Decisions of 2018," by Jeff Sistrunk was published in Law360 on December 14, 2018.