Insurance and Wine….More Fire News
Julissa McKinnon of the Napa Valley Register has been writing a series of very good stories on the fall out of the Wine Warehouse fire. Her most recent addition to the series focuses on the difficulty the insured are having collecting on their policies.
Events of this magnitude, when millions of dollars are at stake and often lost, usually lead to a change in business practices of both those who lost millions and those who are at the center of the loss. In this case I think we’ll surely see wineries looking more closely at the storage facilities in which they house their inventory (looking for sprinkler systems, for example) as well as demanding more transparency in the insurance they buy.
Thanks, Tom, for the pointer to that story: there are valuable lessons to be learned from it for business insureds generally, not just wineries. I expect to be posting about this issue on my law-related blog soon.
Meanwhile, in other legal news, the taxpayers of the State of Michigan are potentially facing an obligation to pay $1.3 Million in legal fees to the prevailing parties in the Granholm v. Heald direct shipment case.
More on the fee claim here: http://federalism.typepad.com/crime_federalism/2005/12/attorneys_fees_.html.
“Insured Location” Provisions Have Winemakers Over a Barrel
Apart from the air of romance that surrounds it and the sensual and intellectual pleasure to be derived from its end result, the business of wine making is not all that different from any other manufacturing business. Raw materials