Businesses are hurting due to COVID-19 slow-downs and closures. Here is my top-five list of things to do to protect your right to collect on your business interruption (a/k/a business income) insurance:
5. Don’t Believe the Propaganda. The insurance industry is trying to stop business owners from making claims by repeating the mantra “no insurance available for COVID-19 claims.” That’s just not true. While some businesses have “virus” or “communicable disease” exclusions, we are finding that many of our clients’ policies don’t have that exclusion. (One analysis is that 80% of policies don’t.) And even with that exclusion, hope is not necessarily lost. There are many, many different kinds of business income policies out there—the specific wording of your policy (even very minor differences) will matter. When an insurer tells you that virus contamination isn’t “property damage” remember that most policies are written on an “all-risk” basis, meaning that it is up to the insurer to clearly exclude something as a “cause of loss.” Courts in Oregon, Washington, and elsewhere have found that contamination from smoke, chemical odors, and e coli counts as “physical loss or damage.” Also, most policies contain “civil authority” coverage that overrides any requirement that your property be damaged—meaning that if you lose business due to a “stay-home” or “shelter-in-place” government order, like the one just announced in Oregon, or the Washington restaurant order, you may have coverage. Continue Reading
The economic fallout from COVID-19 has been swift and severe. Moratoriums, quarantines, and bans will continue to upend daily life and with this impose severe economic consequences on regional, national, and international commerce. While the federal government struggles to prop up the overall economy, many businesses are looking to what, if any, specific relief might be had. This search inevitably leads to insurance. Unfortunately, the question of whether commercial lines insurance might cover COVID-19 related losses results in a lawyerly answer: it depends. More specifically it depends on the (1) the type of insurance purchased, (2) the wording of individual policies, and (3) the particular circumstances surrounding each business’s loss. 
Oregon federal Magistrate Judge Stacie Beckerman gave policyholders an early Christmas present on December 20, 2019, 
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Cannabis businesses don’t have many options when it comes to insurance, because major insurance players are staying out of the market until cannabis is reclassified under federal law. However, cannabis licensees are required to carry insurance by state law (discussed below), and often by landlords, lenders, customers or suppliers. Recent vaping-related bodily injuries have also highlighted both the need for products-liability coverage and the fact that most cannabis-liability policies contain significant exclusions – and below we provide a few ways to deal with these exclusions. Finally, we discuss some hope on the horizon in the form of increasing standardization of forms and federal crop insurance.
The Washington Supreme Court recently issued a decision strongly reiterating the “made whole” doctrine under Washington law, which provides that an insurer cannot exercise its right of reimbursement from a third party who injured its insured, until the insured itself has been made whole by recovery of damages or losses it has incurred. In Daniels v. State Farm Mut. Auto Ins. Co., State Farm paid for damage to its insured’s vehicle in full, less a $500 deductible. State Farm then recovered 70% of the damage from GEICO, which had insured one of the parties whose negligence had caused the loss. (Another party was determined to be 30% at fault; all parties stipulated that Daniels—State Farm’s insured—had no fault). State Farm then reimbursed its insured 70% of the $500 deductible. 
Insurance policies are famously obscure, full of non-sequiturs and jargon. Coverage disputes often feature disagreements about the meaning of policy wording. As a result, courts have developed a process for interpreting policies. In Oregon, the interpretation process (the Hoffman analysis, named for an important case) isn’t the same as for an ordinary contract. It focuses first on the plain meaning of a disputed term, then the immediate context of the disputed term, then the context of the term in the policy as a whole. Overlaid on that are the concepts of the “ordinary purchaser of insurance” among others. If a phrase is deemed ambiguous even after that analysis, the policyholder’s interpretation will prevail. 
The cyber-insurance world is discussing the ins-and-outs of litigation going on between food manufacturing giant Mondelez International and Zurich over coverage for the ten billion dollar NotPetya cyber attack that crippled several multi-national companies. Zurich has 