Benefits & ERISA Law

Intellectual Property Exclusions and Trends in Insurance Coverage Law in Massachusetts

At this point, I think we are entering a new era in Massachusetts law concerning insurance coverage, one different than any I have seen before in my decades of litigating such cases in the Commonwealth. In this brave new world, policies are apparently applied as written, and insureds cannot just claim ambiguities or that they had expectations - somehow reasonable despite being contrary to the actual wording of the policy - of coverage somehow different than that actually provided. That, at least, is the moral of Finn v. National Union, decided last week by the Supreme Judicial Court. In essence, the court enforced the plain language of an intellectual property exclusion in the policy, despite attempts by the insured to argue that it did not necessarily encompass some of the factual variation of the particular claim at issue, and the court expressly held as well that the reasonable expectations doctrine is inapplicable because the exclusion unambiguously precluded coverage. The court, interestingly, didn’t even elect to stop there, deciding to also hammer home the point that the plain language of unambiguous policy provisions controls, by pointing out that extrinsic evidence supporting a contrary reading of the policy cannot be considered in the absence of ambiguity; this is contrary to decades of actual practice in the state’s trial courts, where lawyers for policyholders would regularly toss anything and everything possibly pointing towards coverage into their arguments. The novelty of this idea in Massachusetts practice is illustrated by the fact that the court actually had to go back almost 40 years and then another 40 years more to find two Massachusetts cases to cite to that effect, despite how widely accepted and uncontroversial this idea is in other jurisdictions. A new day dawning? Maybe, but it certainly fits with my sense of the development of insurance coverage case law in this state over the past few years.

Full post as published by Boston ERISA Law Blog on December 08, 2008 (boomark / email).