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 of law. “What you see with COVID19 is, it affects everyone, not just companies that have asbestos or environmental issues,” says Ty Childress, chair of Jones Day’s insurance recovery group and the lead lawyer for World Trade Center Properties during the 9/11 insurance litigation aftermath. “There are well over 1,000 coverage cases across the country already, and we’re still in act one of the play. There are exponentially more policyholders in the claims process right now.”