I am always surprised by the creative ways that insurance pros and insurance companies find to get themselves in trouble. After 15 years of providing litigation support to the legal industry, I thought I had seen every possible scenario for a claim to be denied or the rationale for entering litigation. But the last several months have proved me wrong. Consider the following cases that I have been involved in recently.

In my last article (appearing in the March 2014 issue of NU) I wrote about an insurance company that denied a claim based on the fact that it "believed" an application for insurance did not fully reveal all of the facts. I've always operated on the principle that the facts of any given matter decide how a decision is reached. Producers, take note: It is not the insurance company that is being sued, but the producer who promised certain coverage.

Here's another situation: A construction subcontractor in a monopoly state requested a workers' compensation certificate of insurance for an out-of-state project. The producer issued the certificate indicating the out-of-state location. Several months later, an out-of-state employee working at the out-of-state location was severely injured. The claim was presented and denied by the insurer. The issue in this litigation is that the producer holding himself out as an expert should have known that the workers' comp insurance was precluded from doing business in another state.