A restaurant operator urged a Michigan appeals court Wednesday to consider a layman's understanding of "direct physical loss or damage" when determining whether its insurance should cover losses from pandemic-related shutdowns, comparing the phrase's meaning to temporarily taking a toy away from a child.
To print this article, all you need is to be registered or login on Mondaq.com.
This March marks the unofficial one-year anniversary of the
ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, which has caused widespread financial
ruin to businesses across the United States. In their hour of
greatest need, thousands of these companies turned to their
commercial property insurers only to receive across-the-board
coverage denials. Some policyholders filed coverage lawsuits, but
by taking advantage of pleading deficiencies, insurers managed to
score some early wins, which they used to support their false
narrative that property policies do not cover business income
losses due to the presence of the virus.
To embed, copy and paste the code into your website or blog:
Our initial alert highlighted various hospitality and service industry businesses suing their insurers to recover for losses arising out of closure and stay-at-home (Civil Authority) orders. Since then, thousands more individual and class action coverage actions have been filed seeking business interruption coverage as a result of Covid-19. This article assesses how these new actions have fared thus far.
The class action cases generally allege one of two theories to support claims for business income losses. Many of the class plaintiffs have alleged that the forced closure of business operations by state and local governments (civil authorities) was sufficient to support a claim, without a showing of damage to covered property. Most of these claims have been decided in favor of the insurer defendants, resulting in dismissals of the initial complaints.