Dallas Fort Worth Insurance Lawyer Blog
Claiming roof damage is not as simple as it may appear at first glance. A December 2024 opinion from the Eastern District of Texas, Tyler Division, discusses what the courts look at in roof damage claims wherein the insurance company claims the damage is pre-existing or caused for reasons other than hail damage. The style of the opinion is Winterfield United Methodist Church v. Church Mutual Insurance Company.
The facts and legal history of the case can be gleamed from reading the opinion. This is a summary judgment decision.
Because an insured can recover only for covered events, the burden of segregating the damage attributable solely to the covered event is a coverage issue for which the insured carries the burden of proof. Under certain circumstances, a plaintiff’s failure to segregate is fatal on summary judgment. An insured may carry its burden by producing evidence demonstrating that the loss came solely from a covered loss or producing evidence that a jury could use to reasonably segregate covered and non-covered losses. The Court then pointed out all the evidence produced by the Plaintiff. For these reasons, the court finds that Plaintiff has produced sufficient evidence attributing the church’s claimed damage to solely the January 2022 storm to survive summary judgment.
Alternatively, even if the court were to apply the concurrent causation doctrine, Plaintiff has submitted sufficient evidence from which a jury could segregate damages. As Plaintiff argues, a jury can compare the prior inspection reports and photographs with that post-date of loss. Moreover, the expert “provided a detailed line-item estimate of damages to the Property” detailing “nearly 100 specific line items identifying individual materials or labor, a separate column for the quantity of each item listed, and . . . line items out by each building . . . .” Thus, even if Plaintiff had not provided evidence showing all of the claimed damage was caused by a covered storm, the Court would still recommend denial of summary judgment because Plaintiff has provided a principle that a jury could use to segregate damages.