If asked what an ordinary person might select for casual reading, one might think of books, magazines, or newspapers, but probably not insurance policies. If an ordinary person were to read an insurance policy, what would he or she think it meant? In states that employ the “reasonable expectations doctrine” for insurance policies, courts are often faced with this question. Colorado is one of the states that considers the reasonable expectation of the insured when interpreting insurance policies, and a recent condominium case there took a grammatical approach to determine what an ordinary reader would have understood the condominium policy to have covered.

In High St. Lofts Condo. Ass’n, Inc. v. Am. Family Mut. Ins. Co., 10-CV-02484-MSK-BNB, 2011 WL 4479120 (D. Colo. Sept. 26, 2011), a Boulder condominium started cracking and sloping when the city began road construction nearby. The condominium alleged that vibrations from the local construction caused the damage to its property. The condominium filed a lawsuit against the contractor responsible for the road construction and also filed a claim with its insurance company. The insurance company claimed that “earth movement” caused the damage, and that it was excluded under the following provision in the policy:

We will not pay for loss or damage caused directly or indirectly by any of the following. [ … ]
(4) Earth sinking (other than sinkhole collapse), rising, or shifting including soil conditions which cause settling, cracking or other disarrangement of foundations or other parts of realty. Soil conditions include contraction, expansion, freezing, thawing, erosion, improperly compacted soil and the action of water underlying the ground surface.

To determine what an ordinary reader would understand this policy language to mean, the court took a fine-toothed comb to the grammatical structure of this exclusion.

[S]ubparagraph (4) … is somewhat of an ungrammatical maze. It begins by straighforwardly listing three verbs (technically verb-like gerunds)—“sinking,” “rising,” and “shifting”—each of which describes ways in which earth can move. Somewhat jarringly, the sentence then interposes a definitional term—“including”—without clearly indicating what term or terms are being defined. It proceeds to define one or more of the previous verbs with a noun phrase —“soil conditions.” Because the paragraph later defines the noun phrase “soil conditions” to itself comprise “contraction, expansion, freezing, thawing, erosion, improperly compacted soil and the action of water underlying the ground surface,” an ordinary insured attempting to understand the paragraph would simply substitute the definitional portion of the paragraph’s second sentence for the term “soil conditions” in the first sentence, yielding a provision that purports to exclude coverage for “[e]arth sinking …, rising, or shifting including contraction, expansion, freezing, thawing, erosion, improperly compacted soil and the action of water underlying the ground surface….”

This is somewhat of an improvement, although the object being modified by “including” is still unclear. An ordinary insured might then conclude that a given unit of earth can only move in a few different dimensions: it can “sink” or “rise” relative to its neighboring units, it can “shift” either laterally or forward and backward compared to its neighbors, or it can “expand” or “contract” itself. The remaining terms —“freezing, thawing, improperly compacted soils and the action of [subsurface] water”—describe mechanisms that would cause the earth to move, not movements themselves. Finally, the terms “settling, cracking or other disarrangement of foundations” describe damage that might result when the earth moves as described.

The court concluded that an ordinary person would reasonably understand this policy provision to exclude coverage for damage, when that damage results from movement of the earth caused by “freezing, thawing, erosion, improperly compacted soil, or sub-surface water.” In essence, except for improperly compacted soil, the court removed all man-made causes of earth movement from this exclusion. The court looked to the facts of the case and determined that man-made vibrations from nearby construction may have caused the condominium’s damage and denied the insurance company’s motion for summary judgment.

While some states like Colorado use the reasonable expectations doctrine, many other states take a plain meaning approach that lets the terms of the insurance policy control, regardless of the understanding or expectation of the parties. When analyzing the plain meaning of the terms of a policy, courts can also look to the grammatical construction to determine what policy provisions mean. See Farmers Ins. Exch. v. Versaw, 99 P.3d 796, 797 (Utah 2004); Rich v. Principal Life Ins. Co., 875 N.E.2d 1082, 1091 (Ill. 2007).

The grammatical analysis of the policy in the High St. Lofts case could also be used in jurisdictions that employ the plain meaning approach. The rules of grammar apply to what the terms actually mean as well as to what a reasonable person would expect them to mean. As illustrated by the analysis of this case, the interpretation of insurance policies is not always easy. If you have questions regarding your policy or interpretation, please contact competent legal counsel.