After a barn collapsed in rural Dane County, should a subrogation waiver in the construction contract used for the structure prevent an insurance company from recovering money it had to pay out because of the disaster?

Safety nets come with great expense.

The cost of being uninsured in America is going up significantly next year for millions of people.

Spend any time within spitting distance of a construction project and you’ll instantly feel how the crush of time pressure affects those involved in varying ways, with multiple ripple effects.

There has been a recent spate of appellate cases interpreting insurance policies, including Schinner v. Gundrum and Barrows v. Renfrow. In the newest, Phillips v. Parmelee, all three levels of courts agreed on the interpretation of an asbestos exclusion.

A Sheboygan insurance company is exempt from having to pay after a man accidentally killed his friend in Oconto County three years ago, an appeals court has ruled.

When you run a practice, cutting costs often is a must. Bargain prices on everything from office supplies to office space can make or break your business.

As a construction company or contractor, it is important to insulate yourself from potential liability for injuries and damage that are inevitable in the construction profession.

Federal trucking industry insurance standards from 1980 create safety hazards on American roads and prevent accident victims from being fully compensated, according to a new report from the American Association for Justice, a plaintiffs’ attorneys’ group.

While legal malpractice insurance is a necessity, overpaying for it is not. One key to getting the best rate for legal malpractice insurance is showing the insurance underwriter a law practice that’s set up to be low-risk.

2011AP1487 Palkowski v. Acuity

2011AP1487 Palkowski v. Acuity

A Wisconsin couple learned in 2007 that their vacation home had been rendered uninhabitable because of bat guano that had piled up in the walls. Last week, the state supreme court compounded their troubles by deciding that the loss wasn’t covered by their insurance.

From time to time, I hear people say something like, “It’s not only important the judicial system be fair; it is important the judicial system be perceived as fair.”

The cost of malpractice insurance is an issue for every lawyer.

The cost of malpractice insurance is an issue for every lawyer. Annual malpractice premiums cost thousands of dollars, often straining the ability of small firms and sole practitioners to purchase when premiums approach 10 percent or more of their income on a product they likely will never need.

2011AP42 Winter v. Seneca, Sigel Mut. Ins. Co.

2010AP2435 Peterson v. American Family Mutual Insurance Company, et al.

2011AP167 Elliott v. General Casualty Company of Wisconsin

Two cases pending in the Wisconsin Supreme Court this term should clarify the meanings of two common exclusions in insurance policies: pollution exclusions in homeowner policies and motorized vehicle exclusions in farm policies.

2010AP1835 The Selmer Company v. Selective Insurance Company of South Carolina, et al.

Insurance Title insurance; duty to defend

Insurance Releases; extrinsic evidence

Insurance Bankers bonds; Employee misconduct When an insured incurs liability to a third party — whether in contract or tort — as a result of employee misconduct, financial loss resulting from that liability is not “directly” caused by the employee misconduct and therefore is not covered by fidelity bonds containing direct-loss language. “The particular bond at issue in our case ...

Insurance ERISA; self-reported symptoms limitation The failure to include a self-reported symptoms limitation in the summary plan description (“SPD”) prevents an ERISA plan from relying on it to discontinue benefits. “Here, the SPD clearly sets out that long-term benefits will be discontinued after twenty-four months if a participant’s disability is due to mental illness or substance abuse. It does not, ...

Insurance ERISA

Insurance Subrogation; collateral source rule

Insurance Bad faith An insured may file a bad faith claim without also filing a breach of contract claim. “[W]hile Jones held that a bad faith claim need not be accompanied by a breach of contract claim, it did not hold that a first-party bad faith claim need not be accompanied by a breach of contract. Instead, the court in ...

Insurance ERISA; facility-of-payment clauses Where a life insurance policy contained a facility-of-payment clause, it did not violate ERISA for the insurer to pay the proceeds to the insured’s children. “Under the arbitrary and capricious standard, we overturn the administrator’s decision only where there is an absence of reasoning to support it. See Hess v. Reg-Ellen Machine Tool Corp., 423 F.3d ...

Insurance Automobile policies; negligent entrustment An insurer is not liable for its insureds’ negligent entrustment of a vehicle if the driver was not negligent in his operation of the vehicle. “Bankert and Malone teach us that there is no coverage for Koehler’s alleged negligent entrustment of the vehicle to Raddatz because that act is not an independent concurrent cause of ...