USA – NEW JERSEY Trends and Developments Contributed by: Jeffrey M. Pollock, Pollock Law, LLC
Conclusion New Jersey has not turned against policyholders. It has stopped being unusual. Its canons remain on the books, but the Supreme Court has spent four years reading broad exclusionary language according to its terms, letting extrinsic evidence defeat the duty to defend, and resolving novel coverage questions at the pleadings stage. The legislature, not the courts, deliv- ered the period’s most significant expansion of poli- cyholder rights, and the courts have paced its effect. The federal courts have not changed at all; they have simply become more visible, because the volume of removed coverage litigation since 2020 exposed how much New Jersey insurance law now comes from judges predicting what New Jersey judges would do. Policyholders who plan around the reputation lose. Those who plan around the record – choosing the forum deliberately, pleading exhaustively, pressing certification, and attacking insurer conduct where the paper trail runs thin – do considerably better.
must identify genuinely competing readings, not merely unattractive results. • Plead the record into the complaint. After • AC Ocean Walk , matters counsel once reserved for discovery must appear at the pleadings stage or may never surface. • Attack the reservation of rights early. The quality of the insurer’s correspondence decided • MIST . Where reservations run generic, stale or silent as to the exclusion the insurer later invokes, estoppel and forfeiture stay live. • Do not treat Merck as a shield against modern cyber exclusions. It addressed obsolete language. Current wordings demand a different attack, most plausibly on attribution standards and the burden of proving state sponsorship.
342 I NSURANCE L I T IGATI O N 2026
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