Insurance Research Examples

Real Insurance research prompts, run end to end in Midpage — each with the full exchange, linked authorities, and citator treatment.

• Time-Limited Settlement Demands

  How courts assess an insurer’s failure to accept a time-limited policy-limits settlement demand — the implied-covenant duty recognized in Comunale to accept reasonable settlements within limits on pain of liability for the entire excess judgment, Georgia’s rule that a demand deadline presents a jury question on reasonableness while an unreasonably short deadline alone cannot set up bad faith, the threshold requirement of a valid within-limits offer and the Texas Stowers prerequisites, and the statutory safe harbors — Georgia’s 30-day minimum acceptance period and clarification procedure under O.C.G.A. § 9-11-67.1 and Florida’s 60-day civil remedy notice cure period under section 624.155.

• Appraisal & Bad Faith After Ace American

  How Texas courts have treated bad-faith allegations raised to defeat appraisal after In re Ace American Insurance Co. — the Supreme Court of Texas’s holding that alleged bad faith in claim handling is not an exception to the general enforceability of an appraisal clause, the State Farm Lloyds v. Johnson framework confining appraisal to the amount of loss, the 2026 courts-of-appeals mandamus decisions compelling appraisal over public-policy and prior-breach objections, and the contrasting approaches of Florida’s separate statutory bad-faith action, Minnesota’s causation-inclusive appraisal, and Colorado’s appraiser-impartiality requirement.

• Construction Defect as "Occurrence"

  How state high courts divide over whether defective workmanship is an "occurrence" under commercial general liability policies — the Texas and Florida holdings that unintended construction defects can satisfy the accident requirement, the New Jersey and Michigan decisions treating the 1986 ISO subcontractor exception to the "your work" exclusion as confirming coverage for damage arising from subcontractor work, Pennsylvania’s contrary rule that faulty-workmanship claims lack the fortuity an accident requires, Ohio’s holding that the exception cannot supply an occurrence the insuring agreement never granted, and the consequential-damage line that limits recovery in every jurisdiction.

• Excess Insurer Equitable Subrogation

  The state positions on excess insurers’ equitable-subrogation claims against primary insurers that fail to settle within policy limits — the Nevada Supreme Court’s January 2026 answer to the Ninth Circuit’s certified question permitting the claim even when the suit settled within the insurers’ combined limits, the California origin of the majority rule in Commercial Union v. Safeway Stores, the Seventh Circuit’s survey of the competing theories, Hawaii’s adoption by certified question, the elimination of the excess-judgment requirement for negotiated settlements, and the derivative-rights and clean-hands limits on recovery.

• ERISA Standard of Review After Glenn

  How courts review benefit denials when the same insurer decides and pays claims after Metropolitan Life Insurance v. Glenn — the Firestone default of de novo review and the deferential standard that follows a plan’s grant of discretion, Glenn’s holding that the dual role is a conflict of interest weighed as one factor in abuse-of-discretion review, the proportional weighting courts apply when the record suggests the conflict influenced the denial, the insulation measures that reduce its weight toward the vanishing point, the survival of deference under Conkright v. Frommert, and the independence requirements of the claims-procedure regulation.

• Duty to Defend: Eight Corners vs. Extrinsic Evidence

  How state high courts divide on whether the duty to defend is measured solely against the underlying pleadings or may rest on facts outside them — Texas’s eight-corners rule and its rejection of merits-overlapping extrinsic evidence in GuideOne Elite, Florida’s complaint-allegations rule under Lenox Liquors, California’s rule under Gray and Montrose that facts from any source create the duty and only conclusive undisputed facts defeat it, New York’s one-way rule in Fitzpatrick permitting known extrinsic facts to create but not defeat the duty, and the three-condition gap-filling exception Texas adopted in Monroe Guaranty in 2022.