What SCOTUSBLOG does for the Supreme Court – maintaining a steady and running review of goings on at the high court – Appellate Law and Practice does for the First Circuit, only with a little more humor and quirkiness than SCOTUSBLOG employs. A regular check of Appellate Law and Practice ensures that you don’t miss anything at all, yet alone anything of importance to your own practice areas, that takes place at the First Circuit.
I mention this today because Appellate Law and Practice has the story of a decision out of the First Circuit last week concluding that, as is in fact the rule, business decisions and activities that are not unique to the type of professional services conducted by an insured are not within the scope of that insured’s professional liability coverage. To quote Appellate Law and Practice,
The First Circuit is right about this issue, and between rulings out of that circuit and from the state courts, Massachusetts is becoming a jurisdiction in which this rule is clear and can be expected to be enforced. Not all jurisdictions are like that about this issue, and it can sometimes be hard to convince a court that this is the rule, because it is a limitation on coverage that is generally not expressly laid out in professional liability policies and is instead something that logically flows from the language and structure of the policy. This is not the case in the First Circuit or Massachusetts, however, where the courts clearly get this point.