Rachel E. Hudgins

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On June 27, 2017, the skies over New Jersey were clear and the ground steady. But Merck & Co., a New Jersey-based pharmaceutical company, was under attack. Malware ripped through its computers, damaging 40,000 of them and causing over $1.4 billion in losses.
Merck was not the sole target. Dubbed “NotPetya,” the virus tore through the US economy, and did an estimated $10 billion in damage. (This post describes losses experienced by other companies.) The US Department of Justice charged six Russian nationals, alleged officers of Russia’s Intelligence Directorate (the GRU), for their roles in the NotPetya attack, among others. …
Continue Reading Boots on the Ground or Hands on a Keyboard: Merck and Insurers Battle Out the War Exclusion

Like other policyholders, hard insurance market trends, aggravated by cybersecurity risks, climate change, and COVID-19, have hit higher education policyholders, yielding reduced or limited coverages for increased premiums. These conditions – reduced coverages and higher premiums – are symptoms of a “hard” insurance market. (A hard market is caused by a mismatch between policyholders’ waxing demand for coverage and insurers’ waning risk appetite.) But higher education policyholders face unique risks that exacerbate existing market conditions, including:…

Continue Reading Back to School Blues: Risk Exposures Affecting Higher Education

In 1938, a DuPont chemist’s experiment yielded not—as he first thought—a lumpen, waxy mistake, but a new chemical with remarkable properties: heat-resistance, chemical stability, and low surface friction. Decades of continuing experimentation yielded a class of chemicals with the capacity to make non-stick, water-resistant coatings. In time, these chemicals, per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFASs), would become a major component in thousands of consumer goods: food packaging, non-stick cookware, waterproof clothing, paint, stain-resistant carpets and furniture, and firefighting foams. The discovery of the toxicity of these remarkable chemicals lagged behind the widespread adoption, but eventually yielded a moniker that reflected PFAS’s stability and longevity: “Forever Chemicals.”…
Continue Reading PFAS: From Happy Mistake to Ubiquity to Toxic Liability (But is there coverage?)

In this final post in the Blog’s Landmark Montana Supreme Court Decision Series, we discuss the court’s ruling on the known loss doctrine and its interpretation of “occurrence” in National Indemnity Co. v. State, 499 P.3d 516 (Mont. 2021).
Continue Reading Landmark Montana Supreme Court Decision Series: Known Loss Doctrine & Interpretation of “Occurrence”

This post in our Landmark Montana Supreme Court Decision Series discusses the Montana Supreme Court’s consideration of an insurer’s duty to defend in National Indemnity Co. v. State, 499 P.3d 516 (Mont. 2021).
Continue Reading Landmark Montana Supreme Court Decision Series: The Duty to Defend

In one of the top insurance-coverage decisions of 2021, the Montana Supreme Court at the end of the year handed down a landmark decision adopting the continuous trigger of coverage and “all sums” allocation, finding a duty to defend and ruling that the qualified, or “sudden and accidental” pollution exclusion did not apply. Nat’l Indem. Co. v. State, 499 P.3d 516 (Mont. 2021). The Supreme Court affirmed in part and reserved in part the rulings entered by the trial court, largely upholding a $98,000,000 judgment for the State against its CGL insurer for the policy years 1973 to 1975. The ruling thus helps ensure coverage for the hundreds of claims alleging that the State had failed to warn claimants of the dangers of asbestos exposures to workers in vermiculite mining and milling operations in Libby, Montana, operated by W. R. Grace (the “Libby Mine”).
Continue Reading Landmark Montana Supreme Court Decision Series: Trigger and Allocation

On Wednesday, Hunton Andrews Kurth LLP insurance partner Mike Levine testified before the Massachusetts Joint Committee on Financial Services in support of a bill that takes aim at insurers’ argument that their policies do not cover losses caused by COVID-19 or government-issued closure orders. Passage of H.1079 would give business owners in Massachusetts a fair chance to show otherwise: that their all-risk insurance policies, for which they paid annual premiums, do indeed cover business income losses and extra operating expenses incurred because of the pandemic. …
Continue Reading Hunton Andrews Kurth LLP Partner Michael Levine Testifies in Support of “Leveling the Playing Field” for Policyholders Pursuing COVID-19 Business Income Claims

Just as the Ohio and Delaware supreme courts gear up for oral argument – September 8th and 22nd, respectively – on whether insurers must defend opioid distributors in lawsuits related to the opioid crisis, Hunton Andrews Kurth Partner Syed Ahmad weighed in with the policyholders’ prospective for Law360. “These appeals are significant,” Ahmad explained (and insurers’ counsel agreed), “because of the potential far-reaching impact on the scope of general liability coverage.”…
Continue Reading Ahmad Weighs In: What’s at Stake for Policyholders as Opioid Coverage Battles Enter the Appellate Ring

Hunton Andrews Kurth’s insurance coverage team recently published a client alert discussing a D&O coverage dispute arising from a contractual liability exclusion.

The Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals held that a D&O liability insurer could not rely on ambiguous endorsements as a basis to deny coverage for claims brought by investors against its insured company and its CEO. Reversing the Eastern District of Missouri, the appellate court in Verto Medical Solutions LLC, et al. v. Allied World Specialty Insurance Co., No.19-3511 (8th Cir.), found the policy ambiguous as to whether a contractual liability exclusion had been deleted by endorsement and thus, the insurer must provide coverage for the underlying claims.
Continue Reading D&O Insurer Muted by “Uncertainty” in Contract Exclusion, and “Complicated” Endorsements, in Headphone Manufacturer’s Liability Claim