Arnold Palmer once described golf as “deceptively simple and endlessly complicated.” That’s a good description for insurance also. (Fortunate for me, since I get paid to figure it out.) Given the rules of construction, ambiguities (even latent ambiguities) in insurance policies are supposed to be construed against the carrier. I’ve therefore always wondered why the
business income
Calculating Business Interruption Damages
When I was in college, there was an English professor named Frank Kinahan, who taught a class called “The Little Red Schoolhouse.” A lot of my fellow students (not me, of course!) apparently thought that if they could just write their papers in enough of an arcane and convoluted manner, people (including their professors) would…
Business interruption insurance and Hurricane Sandy
When Hurricane Sandy struck New Jersey last week, one of my out-of-state lawyer friends, employing the sort of dark humor that perhaps only other lawyers can appreciate, congratulated me on my “happy positioning in the world’s greatest business interruption insurance goldmine.” I told him that, unfortunately, this time I might be a plaintiff instead of…
More on Business Interruption Insurance
In the last post, we took a look at the Dictiomatic case, in which the policyholder took a beating for overreaching on a business interruption claim. Turnabout being fair play, let’s now have a look at a recent case in which the insurance company got thumped in the business interruption arena. The case is Amerigraphics…
Business Interruption Insurance
I’m getting ready to speak at an ABA-TIPS conference on the topic of business interruption insurance. Given the number of horrible tragedies we’ve been through in the past decade (prayers for all those affected by the earthquake in Japan), it’s certainly a timely subject.
To cut to the chase: Business interruption insurance is designed to…