What's New—March 2009

Six reference manual updates and new issues of The Risk Report and Captive Insurance Company Reports (CICR) have been added to the IRMI infobases. We have also updated the home page and job function dashboards to facilitate navigation in the site.

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Newsletters & Journals

The March issue of The Risk Report, "A New Method for Interpreting Post-1986 Pollution Exclusions," examines the cases that interpret post-1986 CGL pollution exclusions, hypothesizing that judges are implicitly assessing what might be called the "pollution risk profile" as demonstrated by the facts of the claim. This gives rise to a new approach for assessing the likelihood of coverage being found by a court of law that should be useful to risk managers, brokers, adjusters, and others.

The March issue of Captive Insurance Company Reports (CICR) presents the seven major reasons captives are liquidated or sold, and then offers four financial benefits of doing so. The second article discusses fronting, why it is needed and used, and why insurers like and dislike to front for captives.

Reference Manuals

Commercial Auto Insurance updates and expands the discussion of loss exposures and coverage issues related to the rental of a private passenger type auto. The primary focus of the discussion addresses rentals made in connection with business travel, where insurance coverage for injury or damage that may occur during the course of the rental may be available under both the renter's personal auto policy and the employer's business auto policy. Also included are updated UM/UIM pages for the District of Columbia, Georgia, North Carolina, and South Carolina.

Commercial Property Insurance continues to address the 2007-edition ISO commercial property forms, which became available for use in most jurisdictions as of November 1, 2008. This supplement provides updated annotated policy form discussions of the business income and extra expense coverage form (CP 00 30) and the basic and broad causes of loss forms (CP 10 10 and CP 10 20). Also addressed is the ISO water exclusion endorsement, CP 10 32, which becomes available for use in nearly all jurisdictions in the first quarter of 2009. Lastly, this supplement includes a streamlined and enhanced discussion of how courts analyze multiple causation coverage disputes.

Construction Risk Management updates the discussions of builders risk insurance and workers compensation laws. The Construction Risk Management Newsletter examines recent construction and insurance industry developments.

D&O MAPS has been expanded to include the following policies and analyses.

• Beazley Private Company Policy analysis
• RSUI Not-for-Profit Policy analysis

Personal Risk Management and Insurance updates and expands the personal exposure survey questionnaire and the corresponding explanation/recommendation discussion, which provides suggested solutions to handle the various loss exposures illuminated by the questionnaire. A new discussion in the personal auto state laws section provides information on states that have amended the "newly acquired auto" definition, in contrast to the countrywide definition. In addition, the supplement also updates the uninsured and underinsured motorists (UM/UIM) coverage overview section. Lastly, it updates several UM/UIM (CT, DC, FL, GA, ID, IL) coverage state pages.

Pollution Coverage Issues added 12 new cases to the charts on the "all sums" and "time on the risk" allocation theories, and a corresponding PDF of each case was added to the Caselaw Library. (See the bulletin for more information.) In addition, 21 existing cases were upgraded from an excerpt to a PDF of the full opinion. IRMI's Environmental Insurance Reporter discusses whether a CGL insurer has a duty to defend when the complaint against the insured asserts a mixture of covered negligence claims and excluded pollution claims. The cases show that the insured does not always get a defense. It depends on how interrelated are the acts of covered negligence and the underlying discharge of the pollutant.

Forms

This month six forms and endorsements have been added to the Forms manuals. These include ISO state-specific interline forms, state-specific commercial auto forms, and state-specific personal auto forms. The Forms manuals now include more than 21,370 sample policy forms.