This is a selection from the book titled "Catastrophe Claims: Insurance Coverage for Natural and Man-Made Disasters," Section 7:1 by Dennis J. Wall (©May 2017, Thomson Reuters). This selection is reprinted with permission of Thomson Reuters. Any further reproduction without the consent of the publisher is expressly prohibited.
§ 7:1. Introduction and interpretation
Continued from Insurance Claims and Bad Faith Law Blog, May 30, 2017.
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The surest way to understand the nature of coverage under all-risk policies is to go straight to the exemptions to the exclusions. An all-risk property policy inherently provides coverage for “all risks,” except those which are excluded.
It follows beyond question that the length and breadth of coverage extended under an all-risks policy depends on the exclusions from coverage in that policy.
Yet the coverage analysis of an all-risks policy has not ended with analysis of the exclusions only. There remain the exemptions or exceptions to the exclusions in the all-risks policy; until the exemptions are interpreted and applied, the question of all-risks coverage remains an open one.
The starting point in any coverage analysis of all-risk coverage should always be the exceptions to or exemptions from its exclusions. This is a very different analysis from the analysis used to interpret and apply many other kinds of policies, particularly casualty or liability insurance policies. There are almost certainly many factors more of cases in which courts and lawyers are called upon to interpret liability insurance policies. This is perhaps so because the amounts of money at issue under liability coverages are almost always greater than the amounts of money at issue in property insurance coverage cases. Huge amounts of money at issue always tend to draw greater attention.
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