We have a bumper crop of short takes on significant topics ranging from cat (catastrophe) bonds to hail this month. It’s going to be all the news that fits, we print. Cat Bond Issuance Sets First Quarter Record of $2.2 Billion Despite Fall in Interest Rates Cat bonds once again set a quarterly record in […]
Court Rules for the Insured in First Late Notice/Prejudice Case In what may be the first appellate court case involving the 2009 New York law requiring the insurer to show that it was prejudiced by the insured’s giving late notice of an occurrence, the Fourth Judicial Department1 ruled in favor of the insured. The decision […]
MYSTERIOUS DISAPPEARANCE & AMBIGUITY: NOW YOU SEE IT, NOW YOU DON’T The mysterious disappearance exclusion is now even more mysterious. It was once commonplace in property “all-risk” forms and some named peril forms added it to theft coverage by saying that mysterious shall be presumed to be due to theft. However, it has disappeared from […]
Googling for a discussion of dependence on electronic data, I found this in, of all places, Popular Mechanics. “Vehicles are increasingly behaving like computers with wheels…In the past we would have called it the electrical system, but its mission has evolved way beyond simply moving dumb electrons. Collectively, these electronics are known as the Controller […]
Late Notice Problems Are a Thing of the Past, Right? Wrong! In 2008, New York amended its insurance law to require an insurer to show prejudice before denying coverage for a liability claim when the declination is based on the insured’s late reporting of the occurrence. It’s common to say that New York’s late […]
Certificates of Insurance in the Courts Again Will no one rid me of these troublesome Certificate of Insurance issues? The latest case to stir the pot involves a dispute over coverage on a wrap-up project. An electrician employed sub-contractor Urban Power & Lighting, alleged that he was injured and, as usually happens, sued everyone in […]
Bitcoin seems to be, as Winston Churchill said about Russia, a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma. Even the name Satoshi Nakamoto, the one claimed to have developed Bitcoin, seems to be an alias for some other person or persons. Nevertheless, in many ways using Bitcoin is not that different from what you […]
And Now For Something Completely Different— Dorothy Parker on Insurance Dorothy Parker, the doyenne of the Algonquin Round Table in the 1920s and the quintessential New Yorker, has always been one of my heroes. How could you not love someone who said the two most beautiful words in the English language are ‘cheque enclosed’?1 However, […]
It Takes More Than an Injury to Trigger Liability Michael Mossberg slipped and fell into the water while disembarking from a friend’s sailboat. Mossberg was injured and sued the marina where the boat was docked. The Supreme Court of Nassau County ruled in his favor and Crow’s Nest (the marina) appealed. The appellate court reasoned […]
Courts have a way of shaking up the insurance industry. We are going to look at two cases today that may change the rules in two areas: independent contractors and fiduciary liability. FedEx Offers to Pay $228 Mil to Settle Independent Contractor Case An average of almost $100,000 each, that’s what FedEx Ground has offered […]
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