Posts by Clint Scott

We recently ran across a news story out of Denver about a dispute between a homeowner and her homeowners’ association (HOA), over a particularly bright green paint. At the very end of the piece, the writer mentions that “the clock is ticking for [the homeowner] … who is in danger of losing her homeowner’s insurance.…

In 2013, a small company called Zenefits opened offices in New York and California. Over the past three years, it spread throughout the country. Zenefits, according to its own website, “integrates all of [a company’s] HR functions into an easy-to-use online dashboard;” in layman’s terms, the company sells cloud-based software that helps small to medium…

Commercial property is, by and large, pretty expensive. For many small business owners, buying a piece of property that hasn’t budged on the market for a while can look like a good bargain, since you are more likely to negotiate a better selling price. All of that is well and good, until a pipe springs…

We all grumble a little bit about paying our insurance premiums, until we get hurt or sick – and then those premiums don’t seem so bad. HealthCare.gov tells us that the average cost of a 3 day stay in a hospital is about $30,000, or $10,000 a day. So when you are seriously injured or…

When we talk about agent negligence, we’re not talking about your agent stealing your premiums or selling you a fake insurance policy. As popular as that trope might be on television or in film, outright theft is pretty rare (which is why stories about it go viral so quickly online; it happens so infrequently that…

Recently, we wrote a quick synopsis on all-risk policies vs. named perils policies. In that post, we covered some of the more common types of exclusions most Tennessee homeowners have in their named-perils policies. One we have not yet talked about is infestation. Just as brakes and tires are rarely covered under a warrantee, the…

In many professional and commercial liability policies is a provision called “defense within limits.” In a nutshell, a DWL provision means that the amount of your policy that can be paid out in a claim must include legal defense costs. As a policyholder, this puts you in a unique predicament: if you are being sued,…

In an effort to avoid paying valid insurance claims, insurance companies often deny payment by claiming that a policyholder has made material misrepresentations either before the policy was issued or after the policy was issued. For example, the insurance company may claim that an insured “lied” on the application for insurance. In Tennessee, Tenn. Code…