Commentary and analysis on the
law of insurance coverage

Carl Salisbury

Author / Bramnick, Rodriguez, Grabas, Arnold & Mangan, LLC

carl-salisbury

Leader of the Insurance Recovery and Commercial Litigation Group

Carl Salisbury has nearly 30 years of courtroom and trial experience in complex commercial cases, with a particular emphasis on representing corporate policyholders in disputes with insurance companies. In the aggregate, he has helped policyholders recover more than a billion dollars in insurance coverage. Carl has represented the full gamut of companies in disputes involving large insurance claims, from small and middle-market corporations, condominium associations, restaurants, and non-profit institutions, to Fortune 100 companies. He has helped corporate policyholders recover for insurance claims involving environmental pollution, workplace discrimination, bodily injury and property damage, Directors’ & Officers’ Liability, Errors & Omissions, mold contamination, construction defects, and many other commercial disputes. He also consults with corporations and government entities to analyze and improve their risk management and insurance portfolios.

Carl has been listed in The Best Lawyers in America® for Insurance Law since 2006.  Each year since 2013, he has been recognized as a New York “Super Lawyer” in the area of Insurance Coverage by Super Lawyers magazine. He is AV® rated by Martindale-Hubbell.

In addition to having decades of trial experience in complex cases, Carl has represented corporate clients and amicus curiae (friend of the court) parties in groundbreaking cases before appeals courts across the country, including a number of landmark cases before the New Jersey Supreme Court.  Carl also writes extensively about insurance coverage issues in law reviews, for Law360, in on-line magazines, and for the Insurance Recovery Journal. He is frequently a featured speaker at seminars, trade groups, and webinars on complex insurance topics.

He is also a private pilot and the happy owner of a Cessna 172, which he flies as often as he can.

Legalese Contaminates a High Court’s Coverage Opinion

      Lawyers and judges often find it hard to remember that their professional worlds are steeped in jargon and legalese that the average layperson neither uses in everyday life nor understands.  A majority of the New York Court of Appeals (New York’s highest court) recently succumbed to the belief that a technical legal definition of a phrase in an insurance policy necessarily equates with the everyday “ordinary” definition of the phrase. […]

When an Absolute Pollution Exclusion is Not So Absolute

Smoke Stacks    In the years following its introduction in the early 1980s, the Absolute Pollution Exclusion was sometimes used in highly creative and questionable ways to preclude coverage for claims that were only remotely connected to pollution.  As the years passed, however, courts across the country began to narrow the scope and application of the exclusion to cases involving “traditional industrial pollution.”  Continuing that trend, the Washington Supreme Court recently precluded a carrier from using the Absolute Pollution Exclusion to deny a claim involving carbon monoxide poisoning. […]