Hinch Law

Over the past few months I've had the opportunity through the Illinois State Bar Association  on two occasions to provide continuing legal education presentations about commercial general liability (CGL) insurance and coverage of defective construction.  This can be a tricky area and the law can vary by jurisdiction; the Illinois line of governing cases differs from other States. An insurance policy is essentially a contract between the insurer and the insured, consisting of 1) the declarations, 2) the insuring agreement, 3) conditions, 4) exclusions, and 5) endorsements.  In the CGL world, many insurers use a variation of a nationally standardized form.  One thing that trips folks up is that some of the endorsements seem to say there should be coverage for certain things (for example, defective work done by a subcontractor) and so the temptation is to put the cart before the horse. In Illinois, you don't even get to the endorsements unless the court first finds ...

This post has been updated, see the new post here .   Imagine that your home is destroyed in a fire overnight.  After family and friends, you would likely next call your insurance company to report the catastrophe and initiate a claim.  The person from the insurance company who investigates your claim and calculates the amount to be paid for the loss is called an "adjuster."  About this time you also attempt to read through the fine print morass that is your insurance policy, and realize the difficulty of making sense of it all.  Now imagine that after you report the claim you receive a letter from a "public adjuster," which helpfully points out to you that the insurance company's adjuster is an employee of the insurance company and therefore tied to the insurer's interests, and that the public adjuster is available to help you negotiate a better settlement with the insurance company, often for a percentage of the settlement proceeds, say for example 1...

If you are familiar with the Illinois Home Repair and Remodeling Act (the HRRA), you know that the law requires home repair and remodeling contractors to carry certain minimum insurance, including the following: "...public liability and property damage insurance in the amount of $10,000 per occurrence for home repair or remodeling not in conformance with applicable State, county, or municipal codes , unless the person has a net worth of not less than $1,000,000 as determined on the basis of the person's most recent financial statement, prepared within 13 months."  (emphasis added). There is a long line of cases analyzing what is and is not an "occurrence" in the context of a contractor's commercial general liability (CGL) insurance policy.  That issue is beyond the scope of this post, but suffice it to say that it is a complicated and hotly contested area of the law, perhaps especially so in Illinois.  Throw the HRRA into the mix, and you have the...