This week Tarron Gartner-Ilai's and Whitney Warren's in-depth article on what constitutes a material breach was published in The Journal of Texas Insurance Law, a State Bar of Texas publication. 

Last week produced one of the first published cases interpreting a cyber insurance policy—in Travelers Prop. Cas. Co. of Am. v. Federal Recovery Services, Inc., No. 14-170 (D. Utah). Granting Travelers’ motion for partial summary judgment, the district court on May 11 decided the cyber policy was not triggered and the insurer had no duty to defend its insured.

On March 27, 2015, the Texas Supreme Court dismissed United National Insurance Company’s petition for review of United National Insurance Company v. AMJ Investments, LLC, 447 S.W.3d 1 (Tex. App.—Houston, June 26, 2014).  This development leaves intact AMJ, which follows Vail v. Texas Farm Bureau Mutual Insurance Company, 754 S.W.2d 129 (Tex. 1988), with respect to Texas Insurance Code damages.

Last summer, the Texas Supreme Court’s decision in Greene v. Farmers Ins. Exchange, 2014 TEX. LEXIS 757 (Tex. 2014) left many of us scratching our heads. In Greene, the Court reached the surprising conclusion – at odds with prior rulings – that the vacancy clause of a Texas homeowners policy is not “breached” by the insured’s failure to occupy the residence premises, because it does not confer an obligation upon the insured to occupy the property, but merely defines the scope of what the policy insures.

The pendulum seems to always swing to the left and right before it balances somewhere in the middle. For those who are old enough to remember the meteoric rise of insurance bad faith claims in the late 1980s, decisions issued in the latter part of the 1990s and beyond seemed to signal a near-anaphylactic reluctance by Texas courts to hold any insurer responsible for its conduct.