All Sums Or Pro Rata: Did You Get The Coverage You Bought?

In recent decades, liabilities stemming from long-term bodily injury or property damage—as from exposure to asbestos or contamination of the environment—have presented a variety of new challenges for policyholders seeking to recover from their insurers under comprehensive general liability ("CGL") policies. Injury or damage involved in such "long-tail" claims typically touch multiple policy periods. Most CGL policies are implicated or "triggered" if injury or damage happens during the policy period, regardless of when the claim is made. An employee's inhalation of asbestos fibers may lead to injury that occurs over many decades, as might contamination from a leak of hazardous material. This is quite unlike more traditional and instantaneous "slip and fall" type bodily injury and property damage claims, which only trigger a single liability policy because they happen instantaneously and the resulting claim follows quickly.