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A New Jersey insurer is off the hook for a $10 million judgment that had required it to cover decades-old industrial contamination at a manufacturing site.
On Wednesday, the Indiana Court of Appeals ruled that North River owes nothing toward the cleanup of a former factory in Lafayette, Indiana, where solvent contamination had been discovered in 1983. The case is North River Insurance Company and RiverStone Claims Management LLC v. Landis+Gyr Technology, Inc.
In the early 1950s, Duncan Electric Company began using trichloroethylene, a common industrial solvent, at the site. Landis+Gyr, a New York company, acquired Duncan in 1976, the same year North River issued the first of three excess liability policies to the company. Contamination was discovered in 1983. Remediation was completed in 2017, when Landis+Gyr sought coverage from North River for roughly $7.6 million in cleanup costs.
The claim was handled by RiverStone Claims Management, a Chicago-based third-party administrator that was also a defendant. When negotiations stalled, Landis+Gyr sued in 2021, and a trial court awarded it more than $10 million including interest.
The appeals court reversed, finding that New York law — not Indiana law — governed the policies, and that New York’s “pro rata” allocation method applied. Under that approach, cleanup costs are divided across all years contamination occurred. Spread across 10 years, the annual share came to roughly $760,000, which fell below the $1 million threshold the North River excess policies required before they would pay anything.
The key dispute was whether an “all sums” or “pro rata” method of allocation controlled. Writing for the court, Judge Nancy H. Vaidik explained that while the policies said the insurer would pay “all sums” obligated, they lacked a special type of clause, called non-cumulation, that New York courts require to trigger all-sums treatment.
“Because the North River policies include ‘during the policy period’ language but don’t incorporate or include non-cumulation clauses, pro rata allocation would apply under New York law, and North River would owe nothing,” the judge wrote.
A non-cumulation clause limits “stacking” policy limits in cases where injury or damage spans multiple policy periods.
The court performed an analysis to determine if the case belonged in New York. Most factors pointed to New York, the court said; the most important was that most of Landis+Gyr’s insured sites during the policy period were in New York.
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