An insurer assessing a life insurance claim may have valid reasons to defer its decision regarding payment to the beneficiaries until it obtains necessary information from third-party investigations, such as police officials. There is a rise in publicised cases of murder for insurance, and life insurers are right to defer payment in appropriate circumstances. However
A September 2024 judgment of the Free State Division will be of interest to insurers who provide liability cover to municipalities, as the claimant succeeded in its cause of action against the municipality based on a water interruption which was entirely unexplained.
When a fire broke out at a scrapyard in Bloemfontein, the owner sued
In a February 2024 Australian Supreme Court case the policy provided cover to the insured architect for “civil liability for compensation including the claimant’s legal costs and expenses arising from any Claim first made against the insured during the policy period.”
“Claim” was defined as:
“7.2.1 any writ, application, summons or other originating legal
A fire on a power pole approximately fifty five metres from the appellant’s premises caused the upper arm on the burnt pole to fail, the wiring on that upper arm came into contact with wiring on the lower arm thus causing a high voltage/low voltage intermix. The intermix caused a power surge to the premises
In this Massachusetts Appeal Court judgment the court was required to decide whether the costs of repairing or removing construction defects constituted “damages because of… ‘property damage’ ” within the meaning of a commercial general liability policy of a contractor building.
The homeowner experienced problems in the construction of their home by the insured
According to this 2022 Australian case, an insured person will not be in breach of a reasonable precautions condition if it shows that it did not recognise that a danger existed or that, perceiving the existence of a danger, it took action that it considered to be adequate to avoid it and was not
This judgment Tassell v TAL Life Limited [2024] NSWDC 301 is a reminder that insurers are entitled to a reasonable time required to investigate the claim in question.
What is reasonable is a matter for objective determination dependant on the facts of each claim. The judgment reviews and gives examples of Australian authority for the
A New South Wales court held that the requirement in a life cover document that the insurer “believes, after consideration of medical and any other evidence, that you are incapacitated to such extent that you are unlikely ever to be able to work again in your occupation” had to be satisfied before the total permanent
This blog was co-authored by Lesego Moloisana, candidate attorney at Norton Rose Fulbright South Africa.
In Sandla v RAF, the claimant sued RAF for the loss of support after her older brother (hereafter ‘the deceased’) died in a motor vehicle collision. The claimant claimed that the deceased had inherited the duty to support her during
In a case still to come to court in the UK, insurers and their insured are in a dispute whether the deluge of rain and flooding that occurred in England in September 2023 resulted in damage caused by a “storm”. The property damage and business interruption policy limited cover for a “storm” to GBP25 million.