Devine v. Great Divide Insurance Company

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A man working at a concrete-pouring job was assaulted by another worker at the job site. The injured man filed a lawsuit against the assailant and both the concrete-pouring company and its owner. Although the company’s commercial general liability insurer initially provided a defense attorney in the negligence action, the insurer later brought a declaratory judgment action alleging that the incident fell within the policy’s employee-exclusion clause. The superior court granted summary judgment to the insurance company. The Supreme Court affirmed. "[B]ecause courts look to workers’ compensation law to give meaning to the phrase 'arising out of and in the course of employment' in workers’ compensation/employers’ liability policies, and because commercial general liability policies are designed to avoid the existence of an overlap or a gap between workers’ compensation/employers’ liability and commercial general liability policies, sister jurisdictions interpret the same phrase in employee-exclusion clauses in commercial general liability policies in light of the identical language in workers’ compensation statutes. We have found no case law holding that the contractual phrase 'arising out of and in the course of employment' in commercial general liability exclusions should be interpreted differently from the identical phrase in workers’ compensation statutes. For purposes of this appeal, we will use workers’ compensation case law to interpret the meaning of the commercial general liability policy’s exclusion of coverage for bodily injury "arising out of and in the course of employment.'" The employer did not purchase workers' compensation coverage. And in reading the general liability policy in question, the Supreme Court concluded the superior court did not err in determining that the incident here fell within the employee-exclusion claim. View "Devine v. Great Divide Insurance Company" on Justia Law