Insurance nerds like me will spend days and months debating loopy insurance coverage points and supply every kind of arguments and hypotheticals. Most of the time, we simply let issues go. But the one situation that my insurance coverage firm associates have actually been afraid of is when the loss worth is decided. Why?
Here is a current courtroom ruling:1
The price to restore Plaintiff’s broken property have to be calculated by utilizing the value of labor and development supplies as of the time of loss.
Chip Merlin is pondering: “Happy days are here again,” and “God keep giving me stupid insurance defense attorneys who know less than their clients.”
Hypothetically, right here is the loss willpower based mostly on this rule:
“Joe, a fire is going on in my garage and spreading to my bedroom. What is the cost to repair everything during this ‘time of loss?’ ”
The rule is just not earlier than the loss—the loss by no means occurred. It is just not at an affordable time after the occasion when the insurer agrees to pay “the loss” and thus present the financing for “the loss.”
Instead, these insurance coverage firm attorneys satisfied the choose that the valuation rule is “at the time of the loss!” Yahoo!
That time is the very best priced time of all—and the insurance coverage business makes the argument that that is when the valuation ought to happen. Maybe that is the uncommon case the place the quantity is much less for the insurance coverage firm to pay—however that is the rule!
I’ve begged for this to be the rule. I’ve double-dared the insurance coverage counsel to argue it. It is silly and an argument I might by no means have made as a neophyte insurance coverage protection legal professional as a result of my mentors understood insurance coverage coverage language and intent.
I might have been fired for making this argument as a result of my senior attorneys understood the ramifications. But that was 40 years in the past. Now, we’ve got an insurance coverage protection bar that wishes to win each single case and make each single argument to take action.
You can’t make this up! A federal choose agreed with supposedly realized insurance coverage firm counsel that that is the rule of valuation. A terrific win for policyholders!
Measure the worth at “the time of the loss.”
Thought For Day
Timing in life is all the things.
—John Sculley