…and that I know because David Rossmiller said it was in an article he wrote on Plain English for the Spring 2008 issue of the Oregon Association of Defense Counsel.
In a 1985 article about the drafting of State Farm’s anti-concurrent-cause provision, Michael E. Bragg, an in-house lawyer with the insurer, said drafters made attempts to reduce the clause to language the layperson could understand, but they failed. When the drafters made the language understandable to the average person, they considered the language insufficiently precise to do what it was intended to do, which was (1) to contractually overturn the so-called “efficient proximate cause” analysis, a common law default rule that almost all jurisdictions use to analyze first-party property loss in the absence of a different, contractually mandated analysis; and (2) to stop the spread of new, judicially created causes of loss,and confine covered causes of loss only to those that companies intended to insure. This is important to remember because it is the key to the limits of Plain English laws.
As the Bragg article shows, simplified language was unsuitably risky because it did not address the court precedents that insurers wanted to cancel out. It did not contain the terminology and phrases used by the courts, nor did it accurately state the jargon of insurance causation, where words like “concurrent” and “sequential” have meanings far different and more complicated than their meanings in common parlance. Insurers, then, do not write for consumers, they write for courts.
This revelation was written as support for the points Rossmiller makes points questioning the value of Plain English laws for consumer contracts that have been enacted in some 35 states, including Oregon. Continue reading “Anti-concurrent causation intended to contractually overturn efficient proximate cause – according to in-house attorney for State Farm”