Last Thursday in King v. Burwell, 2015 WL 2473448, 2015 U.S. LEXIS 4248 (U.S., Jun. 25, 2015), Chief Justice Roberts explained that “[a] provision that may seem ambiguous in isolation is often clarified by the remainder of the statutory scheme” when construing a law. In the same fashion, it is inappropriate to find ambiguity residing in a single phrase in a contract of insurance when the meaning can be clarified by referring to the policy as a whole. That was the teaching of a recent opinion by a unanimous panel of Texas’ intermediate level appellate court in 3109 Props. L.L.C. v. Truck Ins. Exch., 2015 WL 3827580, 2015 Tex. App. LEXIS 6146 (Tex.Ct.App., Jun. 18, 2015).
The insured was filmmaker Richard Linklater, the director of over a dozen films including Matthew McConaughey’s debut, the 1993 coming of age comedy Dazed and Confused. Linklater had a $500,000 archive of his various film projects in a building in Paige, Texas. In September of 2011, that was destroyed by the Bastrop County Complex Fire, a 32,000-acre inferno that did $325 million in insured property damage in southeast Texas; it is still the state’s most destructive blaze. Read more ›
At the present time, Oklahoma is at the “sharp end of the spear” with respect to this issue because the state experienced fully 567 quakes of Magnitude 3.0 or greater in 2014. That is the more than in the proceeding 30 years combined, and Oklahoma is on track to see fully 1100 such earthquakes n 2015! When he released his bulletin in March, the state’s Insurance Commissioner stated that his office would assume that the state’s quakes were not man-made “[u]ntil a legal ruling is made.” It now appears that just such a ruling may well be coming in the Sooner State.
The policyholder owned a home in St. Charles that sustained siding damage in a hailstorm in April 2012. The damage was confined to the home’s northern side, and the carrier paid the actual cash value for replacement of all of the siding on that portion of the building. Because the original siding was no longer manufactured, however, the insured contended that she was entitled to recover for replacing the siding on the entire structure, and she brought suit after the insurer refused. 
The policyholder operated a welding business in Uniondale, and the company stored scrap metal in an ungated yard on the property. As summarized by the court, the undisputed facts were as follows:
Washington State has long been a jurisdiction with no judicial pronouncement as to the meaning of the term “collapse” in a property insurance policy, but that changed last Thursday when the state’s Supreme Court issued its decision in 
The policyholder had contracted for the construction for a parking garage adjacent to a performing arts center in Kansas City, and the project included the installation of a 50’ high concrete retaining wall between the structure and an adjacent limestone rock face. The original design called for up to 18” of concrete slurry to be poured between the wall and the limestone embankment, but, at the general contractor’s insistence, it was modified to permit up to 36” of the fill material to be installed. While the slurry was being pumped in place, the wall cracked and failed, and it was uncontested that the change to 36” of fill was a design defect.
The policyholders owned a home with a detached garage in Alpine, Arizona. Beginning on May 29, 2011, eastern parts of the state and western New Mexico were devastated by a massive blaze known as the Wallow Fire – we published a post about an Arizona district court decision concerning business interruption loss that stemmed from that conflagration last month. The fire consumed the detached garage and all of the vegetation on the nearby hillside, but it did not reach the house. On August 6, 2011, however, one month after the Wallow Fire had been contained, there was a mudslide on the hillside, and mud and runoff water from flooding destroyed the home.
Instead of contending that the “requirements in case of loss” language mandated the tapes’ production, of course, the insurer should have sought them through regular discovery and moved to compel if they weren’t forthcoming. It is hard to see how the policyholder could have resisted that motion given her allegations of bad faith.
Early last month a federal court in Indianapolis barred a policyholder from seeking the claims and underwriting files of the defendant carrier’s reinsurer in 
The insured owned a house and secured a homeowners policy that also extended coverage to his mortgagee. The mortgage company instituted foreclosure proceedings and the policyholder vacated the dwelling, but only after removing fixtures and damaging property to the tune of $246,025. The mortgagee’s subsequent insurance claim was denied, and litigation ensued.