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Winter Storm Property Insurance Lessons

Winter storms are too often treated as routine seasonal hazards until they become headline disasters. The data tells a clear story that winter...

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Winter Storm Property Insurance Lessons

Winter storms are too often treated as routine seasonal hazards until they become headline disasters. The data tells a clear story that winter...

Responding to Engineers and Consultants Routinely Hired by Insurance Companies

Insurance companies and their repeatedly very well paid for consultants understand that expert consultants can drive the value of a claim. Nobody in...

State Farm’s Secret Claims Playbook

State Farm is fighting the Oklahoma Attorney General over his ability to intervene in a State Farm bad faith case. This dispute is...

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Can an Insurer Demand Multiple Proofs of Loss? A Partial Proof May Be Enough

How many proofs of loss can be demanded was a question at the heart of a federal court decision involving a Louisiana hurricane...

Contractors and Roofers “No Out of Pocket” Promises Are Backfiring

There are moments when a court opinion stops me cold. Not because it is wrong or that it is something that has never...

Reading Between the Lines of California’s $22.4 Billion Wildfire Claims Announcement

California’s Department of Insurance recently issued a press release announcing that insurers have paid $22.4 billion to wildfire survivors. 1 On its face,...

Risk Scores, Wildfires, and the Quiet Remaking of Property Insurance

The start of a new year is a good time to reflect on how quietly, and sometimes invisibly, fundamental systems change. Few forces...

Fortuity Reconsidered: Why an Unwritten Doctrine Still Haunts Property Insurance

For nearly a century, courts and commentators have treated fortuity as if it were a natural law of insurance rather than what it...

Is a Crack to an Opal a Fortuitous Loss?

One year following the fortuitous loss case Mellon v. Federal Insurance Company, which I wrote about yesterday in The First Discussion of Fortuity...

First Fortuity Case | Property Insurance Coverage Law Blog

The modern debates over fortuity in all-risk insurance often feel abstract, as if the concept emerged fully formed from mid-twentieth-century treatises or contemporary...

The Basics of All Risk Insurance and Fortuity

My recent article, What does “Fortuitous” Mean? Why Is “Fortuity” So Important to Property Insurance? seems like a good time to restate some basic...

What Does “Follow the Form” Mean In Modern Insurance Practice?

Reading Surplus Lines Property Policies in a Tower of Insurance After Ohio Casualty v. Patterson-UTI Energy Commercial property losses involving surplus lines insurance rarely...

What does “Fortuitous” Mean? Why Is “Fortuity” So Important to Property Insurance?

Insurance disputes often turn on small words that carry enormous consequences. Few words are as deceptively simple and as consequential as “fortuity.” It...

Happy Holidays from Merlin Law Group

As the year comes to a close, we want to take a moment to wish our clients, colleagues, and friends a joyful holiday...

Why Christmas Is the Right Time to Thank the People We Disagree With

Christmas Eve has a way of slowing us down, whether we like it or not. The calendar forces a pause. The noise quiets....