May 17, 2018
Martha Brown, a North Carolina partner in Goldberg Segalla’s Global Insurance Services Group, dissects the recent decision in Continental Casualty Co. v. Amerisure Insurance Co., 886 F.3d 366 (4th Cir. 2018). There, the Fourth Circuit determined a second-tier subcontractor’s insurer wrongly relied on a controlled insurance program (CIP) exclusion and was required to reimburse defense expenses to the first-tier subcontractor’s insurer. Martha provides her perspective on the Fourth Circuit’s narrow construction of the “arising out of” language in the second-tier insurer’s CIP exclusion. She discusses how the decision provides clarity to insurers regarding their obligations under the increasingly common CIP exclusion. Finally, Martha provides her thoughts on the significant, but largely unanswered, question of a CIP exclusion’s applicability to contractors who are working on a CIP project but have not actually enrolled in a CIP program.