Media Coverage
Source: Bloomberg Law
Media Coverage
Press Contacts: Erik Cummins, Matt Hyams, Taina Rosa, Olivia Meyer
10.22.25
Major insurance companies are heading to court to avoid covering lawsuits from hundreds of workers who allegedly suffered bodily injuries after handling engineered stone countertops. The surge in these cases, especially after a $52 million verdict in Los Angeles in 2024, has led multiple insurers to invoke exclusion for silica and pollution to deny coverage. Recent reports indicate that at least eight coverage disputes are currently before the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California, with key hearings set for next month.
According to Insurance Recovery & Advisory partner Jeff Kiburtz, the pending motions may be “existential” for small and medium-sized businesses. Without insurance coverage for the claims, “it’s hard to imagine how a lot of them will continue in existence,” he told Bloomberg Law.
A major focus of the motions currently before the court is whether the plaintiffs in the engineered stone cases allege that their injuries were caused exclusively by silica, or whether they also allege that their injuries were caused by other allegedly harmful constituents in engineered stone, such as volatile organic compounds. The insurers’ motions also raise a question of whether the suits allege traditional environmental contamination excluded by pollution exclusions.
If insurers fail to knock out the stonemakers’ coverage bids early on, the suits “will probably move into a lower-grade sort of litigation that’s common in many of these long-term, long-tail cases,” he said. In such circumstances the insurers have accepted “that there’s at least defense coverage, and then you try to figure out how to divvy up the loss and who should be paying for which claims.”
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