Hightower, Stratton, Novigrod & Kantor represents major national carriers from all major insurance markets in complex, large-value first-party coverage disputes under a full range of commercial property policies, as well as first-party property facultative and treaty reinsurance exposures. Our representations include advising insurers and reinsurers over the course of claim adjustment on coverage, allocation, and aggregation. We excel at finding the best strategic approach in connection with various issues, including dealing with threshold questions of whether coverage is provided by all-risk, DIC/DIL, and CAR/EAR policies, as well as the construction and effect of coverage exclusions.

First-party property issues handled by our group also include whether a loss falls within a policy period and/or whether it is excluded on known loss, loss in progress, and other fortuity grounds. Additional issues include trigger and number of occurrences/aggregations, late notice and suit limitation, the scope of environmental clean-up costs, pollution time-element claims, settlement, and other earth movement claims, unscheduled and newly acquired locations concerns, actual cash value v. replacement cost, depreciation, holdback, appraisals and other valuation issues, and code compliance and code upgrade coverage. Our attorneys also reconcile coverages provided by other insurance, allocation of losses among policy periods, and offsets, as well as deal with business interruption/contingent business interruption damages.