While the COVID-19 pandemic has altered our day-to-day lives and experiences, the construction and real estate development industries have had to address how to effectively handle a particularly difficult issue that has arisen: unprecedented price fluctuations with a wide variety of building materials, perhaps most notably with lumber, where prices rose by as much as 400% this spring.
Declaratory judgment actions in which policyholders seek insurance coverage for historical environmental contamination
under comprehensive general liability policies, umbrella insurance policies, and/or excess insurance policies present complex
legal, factual, and scientific issues to defense practitioners. Often, the alleged contamination at issue took place over
decades. These cases usually involve layers of policies offering potential coverage and significant uncertainty regarding
the potential scope of remediation costs.