New York Insurance Law: Under Construction

Imagine you hired a general contractor to renovate the master bathroom of your home. The general contractor hired a subcontractor to do the plumbing work, but the subcontractor botched the job, resulting in a massive leak causing extensive damage to other areas of your home and valuable personal property. You demand full compensation for the loss, but unfortunately the contractors you hired had no assets besides their comprehensive general liability insurance policies.

Will those insurance policies cover this loss?

Until now, New York courts may well have answered this question in the negative, because they did not consider a subcontractor's defective workmanship to qualify as an "occurrence" under CGL policies. But that view may be changing.