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Mounting Evidence of a Sea Change?

On August 16, 2021, the District Court for Clark County, Nevada, denied an insurance company’s motion to dismiss a property owner’s lawsuit seeking business interruption insurance coverage due to COVID-19. A key defense often asserted by insurers in response to such claims is that physical loss or damage is required to trigger coverage and neither results from COVID-19. In this lawsuit, the property owner asserted the impact of SARS-COV-2 virions and COVID-19 exposure on the building’s interior surfaces amounts to an alteration of the property’s conditions resulting in physical damage. Without deciding the issue on its merits, the court found the complaint sufficiently alleged physical damage to trigger insurance coverage and allowed the matter to proceed.
Continue Reading Court Allows Another Lawsuit Seeking Business Interruption Insurance Coverage for COVID-19 to Proceed

Earlier this week, the Third Circuit held in Delaware River Joint Toll Bridge Commission v. Secretary Pennsylvania Department of Labor and Industry that Pennsylvania ceded its authority to enforce its building code and safety regulations against the operator of a transportation facility, the Delaware River Joint Toll Bridge Commission (“Commission”). The Commission is a bi-state entity created by an interstate compact between Pennsylvania and New Jersey (“Compact”) and approved by Congress under the Constitution’s Compact Clause.
Continue Reading Third Circuit Interprets Interstate Transportation-Related Compact as a Surrender of Compacting State’s Authority to Enforce its Building Regulations

On October 20, 2020, Seyfarth partner Sara Beiro Farabow returned to lecture (virtually this time) before graduate engineering students at the Polytechnic University of Milan, the #1 ranked engineering university in Italy. This session of the masters course, “Contract, Claim and Delay Management in Construction Works,” provided a comparative legal analysis of U.S.

Seyfarth partner James Newland co-authored “Preparing and Presenting Loss of Labor Productivity Claims: Analysis of the Methodologies with Two Exemplars”, published in the Summer 2020 edition of the ABA’s The Construction Lawyer.

It is beyond doubt that losses of labor productivity exist in the construction industry. When a party seeks to recover…