A New Year’s Nightmare: COVID-19 Litigation Piling Up
Illustration by Tim Peacock
More than 1,000 lawsuits across industries have been filed against insurance firms over pandemic claims as Hollywood’s largest companies take a wait and see approach on who prevails in court. Unprecedented has become a buzzword amid the pandemic, but when it comes to the financial fallout from business interruptions and the resulting landscape of lawsuits against insurance companies that are denying claims, there truly has never been a fight of this scale.
The 1970s brought a wave of business interruption suits against insurers involving asbestos contamination; in the ’80s, environmental pollution led to courtroom fights; and the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, launched a litany of legal disputes, the last of which didn’t end until 2018. Yet the legal war over COVID-related insurance claims is expected to dwarf any of those battlefields, according to those entrenched in this niche o