Monday, September 11, 2017

Hurricane Irma – The State of Concurrent Causation and ACC Clauses in Florida

For years Florida courts were plagued by the issue of determining the appropriate theory of recovery to apply when two or more perils converge to cause a loss and at least one of the perils is excluded from an insurance policy. Florida courts developed two competing (and potentially inconsistent) theories on how to assess coverage: the efficient proximate cause and concurrent causation doctrines. In December 2016, the Florida Supreme Court in Sebo v. Am. Home Assurance Co., 208 So. 3d 694 (Fla. 2016) put an end to this decades-long debate when it formally adopted the concurrent causation doctrine in a case involving multiple perils and a first-party insurance policy.