Are there “magic words” or are there not? Once again, we feel compelled to warn readers that “we need to know what we are doing.” A lot of people in this “business” of ours cross over jurisdictional lines whether rightly or not. There is a lot of material out there about the ethics of doing so. That’s a reasonable concern to have, but there is a far less discussed, but more serious, problem. It is called malpractice. That term is not limited to attorneys. It isn’t even limited to professionals. It is hard enough to know the law in a single jurisdiction. Know the “law” in every jurisdiction (e.g., state) is, frankly speaking, impossible.
If we are going to “practice” in the real estate world, we need to practice well, not malpractice. “Mal” is a “combing form,” one that is added to words. It comes from the French “mal,” and that came from the Latin “male” which meant “badly.” [We sure hope the word is pronounced differently than is the gender.] The bottom line, however, is that “malpractice” is practicing in a faulty or improper or inadequate manner. No reader of this blog wants to come within a million miles of anything “mal” in her or his practice. So, we need to know that we don’t know the law everyplace. One example is how various jurisdictions view liability waivers. Today, we write only about one aspect of that question – whether to effectively be released from one’s own negligence, a waiver must expressly say that “negligence” is being waived or whether waiving “all” claims for damage really means “all,” including those claims arising out of negligence. [Read more…]
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Today’s blog posting will be a slight deviation from our mission to cover real property law and real property law-related issues. We don’t think so. We think its conclusion could be relevant outside of a pure insurance context. Even if some conclude otherwise, certainly today’s’ Ruminating will be of interest to a subset of readers, those who think they know a thing or two about insurance coverage, but would like to test whether what they know is correct. To those readers who are uninterested in how the sausage of insurance law is made, we concede that today’s posting looks like it belongs in an insurance law blog. Though that argument could be made, it hasn’t deterred us because we think the subject is interesting.
Last week we wrote about a lease seemingly written by an inexperienced draftsperson. Though our point was to highlight the danger of inexperience, the court-reported situation we described also dealt with a missing insurance concept, that of calling (or not calling) for “primary” coverage. As a result, we got a few inquiries about the meaning or implication of that insurance term” and also about its sibling term, “non-contributory,” such as in: “The required coverage must be “primary and non-contributory.” So, here’s the scoop.
Last week, we wrote about the need for competence when it comes to crafting deal documents such as a lease. Among the over 400 Ruminations prior blog postings are more than a dozen dealing with insurance. This week, we get to combine the two subjects thanks to a December 5, 2018 unpublished ruling from a New Jersey appeals court resolving an insurance dispute. The facts are mundane, but provide a roadmap for us today.
Please don’t ask for the central theme of today’s blog posting. We’ve done so already and came up empty-headed. The closest we’ve come is that we’re writing about how a stitch in time saves nine.
What’s an “evergreen”? An evergreen contract is one that automatically renews unless one party or the other affirmatively terminates it. An “evergreen” blogging topic is one that never dies; one that we can visit over and over. The topic of insurance waivers of subrogation is such an “evergreen.”
It doesn’t matter how much you want to continue riding. Beating a dead horse isn’t going to get you anywhere. Or, so we have been told. Nonetheless, we are going to say, for the umpteenth time, landlords and tenants should carry AND RELY UPON their own insurance policies.
We’ve written about many of the “elements” implicated by today’s blog posting, but don’t think we’ve ever illustrated them in the context of a specific lease provision. Among them are the concepts of “no-fault, risk shifting” and “not spending negotiating capital, effort, time or money” on protecting an insurance company (unless you happen to be working for one).
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