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One practice that has plagued the insurance industry in recent years has been contractors soliciting homeowners to make insurance claims after a hailstorm, for example, and then obtaining an assignment of rights to the claim and pursuing litigation against the insurer. The Iowa Supreme Court recently ruled that a contractor’s attempt to obtain such an assignment of rights was void because the contractor was acting as an unlicensed public adjuster, in violation of state law. The line of argument made here may be useful to insurers in other jurisdictions faced with abusive practices by contractors.
Continue Reading Assignments of Benefits Under Homeowners Insurance Policies: Iowa Supreme Court Rules that Assignment Was Void Because Contractor Was Acting as Unlicensed Public Adjuster

A new law represents a major step forward to remedy Florida’s assignment of benefits (“AOB”) crisis, which Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has described as a “racket” in recent years. On Thursday May 23, 2019, Governor DeSantis signed House Bill 7065, which addresses the abuse of post-loss AOBs for residential and commercial property insurance claims, by (among other things):…
Continue Reading New Statutory Framework Confronts Florida’s AOB Crisis

A New York trial court recently granted an insurer’s motion for summary judgment pursuant to the “Residence Premises Condition” contained in a homeowner’s insurance policy.  Aschmoneit v. Adirondack Insurance Exchange, 2018 N.Y. LEXIS 3418 (August 7, 2018), The court found that the insured did not reside at the home despite an affidavit asserting that he spent “most weekends” making repairs to the home.
Continue Reading Residence Premises Condition: New York Trial Court Grants Summary Judgment Based On a Finding of A “Feigned” Affidavit

A typical claim for a homeowner will involve some type of damage to the property, which, in turn, prompts the insurer to perform an inspection of the insured property, so as to assess the cause and extent of the alleged damage. Depending on the nature of the claim, insurers may be able to have a solitary claims professional perform the inspection in a rather minimal amount of time, but that is not always the case. In particular, when an insured has claimed damage to the property’s roof, the claims professional may need assistance in gaining access to the roof—perhaps requiring a ladder assist—or otherwise will need to use caution in assessing the claim, which can be time consuming.
Continue Reading Drones and Insurance: How Unmanned Aircraft Systems Can Assist Insurers in Timely and Effectively Evaluating Property Damage Claims

As we have written about before on this blog, the water damage caused by Hurricane Sandy in October 2012 gave rise to important questions concerning the applicability of so-called “anti-concurrent causation” clauses. Such was the case in the recently-decided matter of Carevel, LLC v. Aspen American Ins. Co., 2016 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 157919 (D.N.J. Nov. 15, 2016).

In Carevel, the insured’s building in Jersey City, New Jersey suffered interior water damage during Hurricane Sandy. The relevant insurance policy excluded damage caused by flood. The flood exclusion included an anti-concurrent causation preamble with the familiar language excluding flood damage “regardless of any other cause or event that contributes concurrently or in any sequence to the loss.” Importantly for the legal issues raised in this case, the policy did cover, via endorsement, damage caused by water that backed up through sewers or drains. Following an investigation into the loss, Aspen obtained a report indicating that the interior water damage was caused by street-level flooding that had infiltrated the building during the storm. Aspen denied the claim based on the flood exclusion. The insured filed suit, claiming that the damage was caused by water that had entered the building through the basement’s sewers or drains.
Continue Reading Hurricane Sandy, Flood, and Sewer Backup: New Jersey Federal Court Confirms Anti-Concurrent Causation Bars Insured’s Claim

Courts across the country (and particularly since Super Storm Sandy in 2012) have consistently held that, in litigation involving a dispute concerning the investigation, adjustment, or payment of a flood claim under the Standard Flood Insurance Policy, policy holders are limited to breach of contract causes of action against their Write-Your-Own insurance carriers. Those courts…

Drone mapping provides insurance companies with an easy, fast and accurate method of documenting a scene and preserving key details  while also letting the process of clean-up and reconstruction begin as quickly as possible. Recently, Dronotec, a start-up company specializing in drone inspection for insurance companies conducted a case study to determine just how much money this drone mapping was saving insurance companies. Dronotec’s founder, Emilien Rose, worked as a loss assessor in France and Australia for 10 years and conducted assessments of about 8,000 claims. Rose believes that Dronetec and drone mapping can really save time and money for insurers.

For example, recently a fire in France consumed 5 acres of a vacation destination on the coast. Once the insurance company came in to assess the damages, they realized that the sheer size of the site posed quite a challenge. Moreover, so much of the property was damaged by the fire, inspectors could not enter the properties or inspect the roofs without the threat of personal injury. A plane attempted to capture photos but many of the photos were not clear or sharp enough to use. However, the loss adjuster recommend a drone to do the mapping of the scene. In about 10 minutes, the drone collected more than 300 geo-tagged photos flying about 180 feet over the property. The images were uploaded to a drone mapping program, and three hours later a 2-D map and 3-D model of the property and the damages were available. The high degree of accuracy of not only the photos but the mapping improved the likelihood of identifying the cause of the accident exponentially. And the insurance company’s team members were able to collaborate and review the mapping in one cloud-based space. In this one case, the use of drone mapping saved this French insurance company about €99,985,000 (or about $110,600,000).

The ability to quickly process claims is very helpful to insurance companies with large scale disasters that have many claims filed related to the same incident.
Continue Reading Drone Mapping the Way of the Future for Insurance Companies

Back in March, our Data Privacy + Security Insider blog reported an increase in the use of commercial drones by State Departments of Transportation across the country. Now, insurance companies are also getting in the game. Using drones for underwriting, determining property values and conditions for policy issuance, inspections and risk evaluations may be more…

The Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals recently explained that under Florida law a policyholder who fails to provide prompt notice of a claim faces an uphill battle defeating the resulting rebuttable presumption of prejudice to the insurer. The court also affirmed an award of attorneys’ fees to the insurer under Florida’s offer of judgment statute.…

In May 2014, Nevada became the latest state to interpret the breadth and applicability of the pollution exclusion contained within a third-party general liability policy. Although many states have considered this question, those courts have reached diametrically opposite conclusions, leading to confusion and uncertainly, particularly with respect to states that have yet to address the…