Indian Harbor Insurance Company v. Daikin America, Inc., Index No. 032586/2024 (N.Y. Sup. Ct. Rockland Cty. Nov. 11, 2024).
Mound Cotton won summary judgment in New York State Supreme Court on behalf of its client, Indian Harbor Insurance Company, in a coverage dispute involving the duty to defend and indemnify its insured from numerous PFAS-related claims. The insured, Daikin America Inc., sought coverage under an Indian Harbor claims-made-and-reported excess liability policy for over twenty different lawsuits involving hundreds of individual claimants, alleging PFAS contamination from Daikin’s facility in Decatur, Alabama.
The court ruled that Indian Harbor has no duty to defend or indemnify Daikin for current or future lawsuits regarding claims filed after April 1, 2017, on the grounds that the claims were not made against Daikin or reported to Indian Harbor (i) during the policy period or (ii) by the expiration of the last “consecutive and uninterrupted policy” issued by Indian Harbor, as specified in the policy’s “Multiple Policy Period” provision. As the Court rightly noted “this language serves as a deadline for claims to be made under the provision, because the Multiple Policy Periods is not an invitation to continue filing claims stemming from the Pollution Event indefinitely.”
Significantly, while Daikin contended that two of the claims “related back” and were timely made because the two claimants were putative members of a class action lawsuit that had been filed and reported during the policy period, the court rejected this argument, holding that the subsequent suits by the two claimants “subjected Defendant [Daikin] to new liability separate and apart from the Class Action.”
Partners Lloyd A. Gura, Raymond S. Mastrangelo, and associate Alexander Hyder represented Indian Harbor Insurance Company.