Latest Commercial General Liability Headlines
All the headlines from our Commercial General Liability Topic Page, ordered by recency.
Home Depot Appeals to Get Defense Costs From CGL Policies for 2014 Breach
Dec 15 2023 // Think cyber events don’t have long tail? Consider this: Home Depot is still in a legal battle to get $50 million in coverage from two insurers nearly a decade after hackers used point-of-sale machines to hack the...
Travelers Wins CGL v. E&O Battle in Insurance Agency Defamation Case
Dec 8 2023 // Travelers Casualty Insurance Co. did not owe a duty to defend or indemnify its insured, CBIZ Borden-Perlman Insurance Agency, Inc., in a tort action in which Republic, as another insurer of B-P, bore the litigation and...
Is It Auto or CGL … or Both or Neither?
Oct 16 2023 // For many people, the outdoor grilling season is about over. Notice that I said “grilling” season and not “BBQing” season. Being a Southerner, we know that outdoor cooking is known as...
Do Truck Drivers Need CGL Coverage?
Aug 1 2022 // During my 17-year stint at the Big “I” national association, I received tens of thousands of coverage questions from member agents. One of the most common questions was whether someone needed [insert type of...
All Additional Insureds Aren’t the Same
Feb 7 2022 // For at least the past couple of decades, it seems that in just about every contract, the upstream party wants to be an additional insured (AI) on the downstream party’s insurance. Most commonly, the request is for AI...
‘All Generalizations Are Dangerous….’
Sep 7 2020 // I love quotations. I’ve collected them for almost 50 years. Over 20 years ago, I published my first book which was a collection of 1,500 of my favorite quotations, all indexed and cross-referenced, with an...
The Facts About Supposed ‘Illegal Acts’ Exclusions
May 18 2020 // Is the Insurance Policy Affected if the Business Opens Against a Governor’s Orders: The Facts About Supposed “Illegal Acts” Exclusions States have gone to war against some municipalities over COVID-19....
Anticipated Coronavirus Claims Scenarios Across Major Coverage Lines: Viewpoint
Apr 9 2020 // As the COVID-19 pandemic has progressed over the past several months, participants in the insurance industry have recognized the likelihood of a resulting increase in claims volume. Much of the early focus has been on the...
Coronavirus and the CGL
Mar 25 2020 // Although the Virtual University has not received questions regarding how the commercial general liability (CGL) policy will respond to the coronavirus (COVID-19), the CGL’s response must still be understood. Various...
Logic & Language, Forms & Facts: The Case of the ‘Holey’ Insurance
Mar 9 2020 // For a number of years, I’ve done a workshop called “The Adventures of Ace Insura, Claims Detective.” Participants assist Ace in solving a variety of coverage and claims mysteries. Each case has one or...
Facing Hundreds of Abuse Claims, Boy Scouts of America Files for Bankruptcy
Feb 18 2020 // The Boy Scouts of America said on Tuesday it had filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy amid a flood of lawsuits over allegations of child sexual abuse stretching back decades. The bankruptcy is not expected to affect the...
Resolving Claim Disputes: Step 3 Research and Document the Interpretation – Part 1 of 3
Sep 16 2019 // This article introduces a three-part series covering over a dozen largely legal and contractual principles, many of which are used by attorneys to resolve contract disputes. Most of them can also be used by agents and...
3 Problems with the Coverage Territory
Jul 10 2019 // When a customer buys an insurance policy, one of the often unanswered (and unasked) questions is “where does this policy apply?” You may not think it’s a big deal. But what if you just wrote a CGL policy...
Comparing Coverage: Umbrella and Excess Liability
Jun 17 2019 // Liability insurance protects the customer when something happens to someone else. Customers have liability exposures if they do something, sell something, have a place, go to a place or hire someone, among other...
Analysis: Warren Buffett Champions an Inferior Product in THREE Policy
Mar 25 2019 // Warren Buffett, often ahead of the curve, sounded like a disrupter in a 2004 shareholder letter. Fifteen years ago, Buffett wrote, “Insurers have generally earned poor returns for a single reason: They sell a...
Mass. Court Finds Insurer Duty to Defend Subcontractor in Property Damage Case
Mar 20 2019 // A Massachusetts Appeals Court has ruled that an insurance company is responsible for insuring alleged property damage caused by its subcontractor client, vacating an earlier Superior Court decision that the insurer has no...
Cyber Attack, or Act of (Cyber) War?
Feb 4 2019 // How a Small Distinction Can Nullify Insurance Coverage In June 2017, the NotPetya virus crippled many large companies including Merck and Mondelez (the manufacturer of Nabisco, Cadbury, and Toblerone). The aggregated...
Not#YouToo
Jan 7 2019 // How Not to Become Part of the #MeToo Conversation, and Where to Look for Help If You Do Not long ago, if someone asked you if you had heard about Harvey Weinstein and Kevin Spacey, you would assume they were working on a...
Court: Travelers Insurer Off the Hook in Florida Hotel Chain Data Breach Suit
Nov 21 2018 // A U.S District Court in Florida’s ruling could have wide-reaching effects with respect to an insurer’s duty to defend commercial general liability policyholders in data breach cases resulting from the acts of...
Ohio Supreme Court: Subcontractor’s Faulty Work Not Covered by Contractor’s Policy
Nov 5 2018 // The Ohio Supreme Court in early October ruled that a general contractor’s commercial general liability policy does not cover the faulty work of a subcontractor. In its consideration of Ohio N. Univ. v. Charles...
