General and products liability policies are a cornerstone of risk management for businesses, providing protection against alleged liability because of bodily injury, property damage, and personal or advertising injury claims. These policies are often paired with self-insured retentions (SIRs). Although some policies with SIRs may provide “first dollar” coverage, particularly for defense costs, an SIR typically represents the amount of covered loss a company agrees to pay out of pocket before the primary layer insurer’s coverage attaches. While common, SIRs can introduce many traps for the unwary—especially if the SIR is applied on a “per-occurrence” basis (or, in some policies, a “per-claim” basis) without an aggregate cap.
It’s said that an ant can carry fifty times its own weight. That’s nothing.
When wildfires, floods or other disasters strike, multiple policyholders can be affected in similar ways. But historically, each policyholder would take on their insurance company alone—a tough task, especially for individual policyholders and especially when any given policyholder’s claim is dwarfed by the relative legal and financial might of the insurer. The recent ruling in 
In today’s volatile global economy, companies are learning the hard way that political shocks—whether through trade sanctions, military conflict or abrupt regulatory change—can wreak havoc on supply chains. And worse, many are discovering that their existing insurance coverage may not offer relief.
Delaware has long been the leading jurisdiction in which companies incorporate. According to Delaware’s 
The Second Circuit Court of Appeals has weighed in (again) on a still unsettled issue in the realm of insurance law: whether arbitration provisions in insurance policies issued by foreign insurers are enforceable notwithstanding states’ anti-arbitration statutes? If they are, coverage disputes between policyholders and insurers are likely to be relegated to arbitral decision under insurer-favored arbitration clauses; if not, policyholders may pursue their rights in a more favorable forum. In 
The Illinois Supreme Court has teed up a significant insurance question: Does a standard pollution exclusion bar coverage when the alleged “pollution” was not considered to be pollution when the policy issued—where the substance was lawfully emitted under an environmental permit?