Shook insurance and reinsurance attorneys have handled litigation, arbitrations and appeals concerning coverage for toxic torts and environmental contamination, product liability, business torts, premises liability, professional and fiduciary liability, credit union and banking fraud, punitive damages, advertising injury, construction defects and intellectual property claims. The group has also tried, mediated and negotiated bad-faith claims across the country.
Shook’s insurance practice is truly nationwide in scope. We have decades of experience litigating coverage disputes in dozens of state and federal jurisdictions throughout the United States.
Representative Matters
Mass Torts | We represent insurers in disputes relating to coverage for mass torts and other large-scale claims such as opioid litigation, injuries caused by storms and power outages, large-scale construction defect claims, and other claims.
Environmental and Asbestos | We frequently represent insurers in major environmental claims, including claims relating to ETO exposure, oil spills, industrial fires, and similar incidents, and long-term cleanup costs. These disputes often involve decades of insurance policies and complicated known-loss, allocation, and contribution issues.
We also have won groundbreaking decisions about insurance coverage for asbestos claims, including a groundbreaking appellate decision that received national media attention and eliminated what the insured argued was over a billion dollars in liability. We also have won significant decisions relating to bankruptcy rights, number of occurrences, and exhaustion of multi-year policy limits.
Bad Faith/Extra-Contractual Liability | We represent insurers in lawsuits alleging “bad faith” and other theories seeking damages beyond the limits of the insurance contract. We have won many such suits, including victories in the Missouri Supreme Court and the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit.
We also have represented insurers in litigation relating to the insurers’ business practices and market conduct. For example, we served as class counsel for a putative class of more than 500 insurance companies in a case involving allegations of decades-long financial reporting fraud by another insurer on other insurers participating in workers’ compensation state residual markets. We worked with economics, statistics and insurance industry experts to develop a damages model showing more than $2 billion in compensatory damages. The case settled before summary judgment motions for a $450 million recovery on behalf of a settlement class.
Trigger of Coverage | Shook attorneys have been pioneers in developing and presenting the issue of trigger of coverage—the requirement that the insured establish that the bodily injury or property damage occurred during a policy period in order to be entitled to coverage under that policy. For more than two decades, we have located and worked with appropriate experts to establish that bodily injury or property damage does not immediately trigger coverage in cases involving building materials, groundwater contamination, asbestos and silica. We are repeatedly brought in as trial and appeal counsel in these cases.
Policy Existence Issues | Shook attorneys have decades of experience in defending claims attempted to be made under decades-old policies whose existence is unclear. In one such case, our opponent asserted that our client had issued primary CGL policies that provided unlimited coverage for asbestos liabilities from 1942 to 1952. Following an extensive two-month trial, the San Francisco Superior Court issued a 120-page decision, ruling for our client on every issue of significance and finding that the existence of the allegedly missing policies had not been proven and that our opponents’ claims were barred by laches in any event.
Successor Liability | We have obtained precedent-setting victories, including in the Indiana Supreme Court, for claims relating to successor-liability issues. These decisions were significant victories for the insurance industry, establishing important precedent protecting insurers’ rights to choose their insureds and their ability to protect against risks due to corporate transactions occurring after policy issuance. We also have represented reinsurers in litigation over loss portfolio transfer agreements.
Personal and Advertising Injury and Cyber Issues | We have extensive experience litigating claims involving the “personal and advertising injury” coverage and attempts to find “silent cyber” and similar coverage in policies that were not underwritten to cover such claims.
