Long title, I know, but hopefully it sparked your interest, or perhaps dredged up painful memories of drawing those sentence diagram structures on wide ruled paper, wondering if you would ever use that skill in “real life.”  Well, see how you think it worked in the case of Artist Building Partners v. Auto-Owners Mutual Insurance Company, No.M2012-00915-COA-RM-CV (Tenn. Ct. App. Nov. 21, 2013) (Download here). This was an insurance case where the issue under consideration was the construction of a Business Income and Extra Expense limitation, which provided in part as follows:

            [w]e will pay for the actual loss of Business Income you sustain due to the necessary suspension of your ‘operations’ during the ‘period of restoration and necessary Extra Expense you incur during the ‘period of restoration’ that occurs within 12 consecutive months after the date of the direct physical loss of or damage to property at the described premises, including personal property in the open (or in a vehicle) within 100 feet, caused by or resulting from any Covered Cause of Loss. 

 

The question presented was whether the 12 month limitation contained in the above policy provision applied both to the business income coverage and the extra expense coverage, or only to the extra expense coverage. Despite efforts by the insurer to argue that the 12 month limitation applied to both coverages (including the proffering of an expert witness from Vanderbilt University who had prepared a diagram of the sentence at issue and rendered an opinion as to its meaning), both the trial court and the Court of Appeals found that the language was, at the very least, ambiguous, since it was susceptible to more than one reasonable interpretation.

 

The Court of Appeals acknowledged the contrary opinion of the “learned professor” but opined that “an insured should not have to resort to retaining an ‘expert in sentence diagraming’ in order to properly interpret his or her insurance policy.” Because the policy language was susceptible of this reasonable interpretation from the standpoint of the insured, the 12 month limitation did not apply to the business income claim.  

 

I’ll bet most of us were thankful that we stopped diagraming sentences in high school – but maybe we need to get those grammar books back out!