The 2025 Insurance Coverage Year in Review curates the most consequential insurance coverage rulings of the year to assist corporate policyholders, risk managers and in-house counsel with existing and future claims and policy renewals. In the liability space, 2025 continued an evolving trend where insurers have increasingly focused on challenging the satisfaction of threshold insuring agreements, as opposed to assuming the burden of proving policy exclusions. Cases involving the existence and number of “occurrences,” for example, repeatedly appeared in appeals around the country. 2025 also saw key decisions on priority disputes, related-claims provisions, and “bump-up” exclusions.
On the property side, several disputes over the threshold requirement of “physical loss and damage” appear to be reclaiming ground lost in COVID-19 business interruption disputes. Across coverage types, we also saw a continuing trend toward increased reliance by insurers on facts and evidence external to the actual policy to decide coverage disputes. This trend manifested in several cases addressing the use of parol evidence to resolve ambiguities in policy terms and in a yet-to-be-decided case addressing fortuity.
As always, the first-party and third-party insurance coverage landscape is constantly evolving, but the concise summaries presented here are intended to allow corporate insureds to keep informed and ahead of the most salient developments in the domestic insurance law.
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