In the finance world, Special Purpose Acquisition Companies (SPACs) are proliferating like Dutch tulips. This year alone, they’ve exploded in popularity, with multitudes of celebrities, politicians, and influencers sponsoring SPACs of their own. The list includes the likes of Colin Kaepernick, Shaquille O’Neal, Alex Rodriguez and Tony Hawk. Even amidst new concerns from the SEC, which reportedly opened an inquiry into the investment risks of SPACs and issued a bulletin warning prospective…
In a previous post, we addressed blanket additional insured endorsements and the role they play in passing insurance obligations downstream. In short, the purpose of a “blanket” endorsement is to grant additional insured status to any company as required in a written contract with the named insured. This obligation often begins in the prime contract where the owner requires additional insured status on the general contractor’s insurance. However, the general contractor typically attempts to…
On March 13, 2020, three plainclothes police officers forced entry into an apartment and fired some 32 shots. A woman sleeping in her bed was shot six times and died.
On May 25, 2020, a Black man was killed during a routine arrest when a police officer knelt on his neck for 9 minutes and 29 seconds.
On September 3, 2020, a woman drove her car into a crowd of Black…
A recent article in Law360 shines a spotlight on an Amended Complaint filed by Pillsbury’s award-winning Insurance Recovery and Advisory Group in a significant insurance recovery action seeking coverage for COVID-19 business interruption. In it, the Amended Complaint is described as a “beefed-up filing” where our colleagues have “unleashed a deluge of scientific studies on COVID-19.” The article suggests that the “the arguments outlined in Tuesday’s filing could be a potential avenue around Mama Jo’s…
In recent weeks, two insurers with significant legacies of occurrence-based general liability coverage took important steps to liquidate their estates.
Bedivere Insurance Company (OneBeacon) Liquidation
The first insurers are associated with Bedivere Insurance Company, formerly known as OneBeacon Insurance Company (OBIC). OBIC’s history stretches back to the 1800s but is most well known as the successor to the General Accident and Commercial Union families of insurers. These companies wrote many policies from the 1960s through…
Insurers generally have a statutory duty to provide a legitimate factual and legal basis to deny a claim, and to discharge this duty sometimes engage in-house or outside counsel to assist in the investigation and handling of policyholders’ claims for coverage, including ghostwriting coverage correspondence and denials of coverage. The decision to outsource ordinary claims investigation and handling to legal counsel (putting aside that many claims handlers are lawyers) comes at a price. Two recent…
The Biden administration has hit the ground running with executive orders, regulatory and legislative priorities, and cabinet-level and other top posts being announced on a daily basis. Our public policy colleagues have been closely tracking many of the policy priorities of the new administration and highlighting important regulatory and legislative developments that businesses can expect coming down the pipeline.
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Since the beginning of the COVID-19 business interruption insurance coverage battles, insurers have labored to pour cold water on these claims—often hiring the biggest and wealthiest law firms in America to crush hair salons, motels, restaurants and bars represented by solo practitioners or lawyers with little prior insurance coverage experience. Not surprisingly, insurers have been successful in many of these early David-versus-Goliath cases (many of which involved policies with virus exclusions that the policyholders were…