Cannabis is now fully legal in ten states plus the District of Columbia, and medical marijuana is legal in 23 states. Despite growing acceptance among states, cannabis remains illegal federally under the Controlled Substances Act of 1970 as a Schedule 1 substance, which has made oversight and regulation of the…
Your factory is flooded and manufacturing line destroyed. A hacker breaks into your computer system and erases customer data even though you paid the ₿1,000 ransom in bitcoins. A jury just returned a $5 million verdict against your company and an employee who got into an accident while texting and…
It’s a familiar story to anyone involved in insurance claims. A policyholder is sued and tenders the claim to its insurer. The insurer agrees to defend subject to a reservation of rights, but it also asserts that policy exclusions may ultimately preclude coverage. While the underlying litigation is ongoing, the…
A little under two years ago, we wrote about the fatal Oxford comma—you know, the one that comes before “and” in a list—and the impact of its omission on a court’s interpretation of a Maine employment statute. The court effectively gave a $10 million lesson in grammar and ambiguity, but…
The world of patent defense insurance is evolving. What once was governed by a routine part of the “advertising liability” section of the Commercial General Liability policy is now the focus of specialized insurance products, the contours of which are still being defined. CGL policies are standardized forms developed by the…
When adding new or additional layers to an insurance program, policyholders are often asked to sign a “warranty letter” providing comfort to the prospective insurer that the policyholder is not aware of impending claims. Typical warranty letters include both subjective and objective representations, indicating that the policyholder has both no…
The Supreme Court of Texas delivered good news to policyholders insured under a “Joint Venture Provision” endorsement commonly used in the oil and gas industry. In Anadarko Petroleum Corp. v. Houston Casualty Co.—a case arising from the 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster—the court held that insurers assumed the obligation to reimburse…
It’s time-proven advice: Never underestimate the power of an apology. This is true even in a legal context, and especially during a corporate crisis—an event with the potential to materially harm a company’s reputation or bottom line due to alleged negligence, malfeasance or other liability-driven factors. But even when an…
Have $57 million (or more) to spare? You’re going to need it if you run afoul of the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) without cyber insurance. In late January 2019, the French data protection authority, CNIL, imposed a fine of €50 million—or roughly $57 million—on Google for violations of…
Does the coverage in commercial general liability (CGL) policies for violations of the right to privacy extend to unwanted intrusions, or is it limited to the disclosure of personal information to a third party? On a recent request for clarification from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit…