Insurance Law Monthly

There is much Canadian, and very little English, authority on the scope of a liability insurer's duty to defend its assured when there is an arguable defence to the assured's claim for an indemnity. In Maag v Chubb Insurance Singapore Ltd [2026] SGHC 143 Kwek Mean Luck J in the Singapore High Court reviewed the authorities and laid down important propositions based on them. These propositions would appear to represent the default position in English law when the policy is otherwise silent on the trigger for the duty to defend.

In Nuix Ltd v Berkshire Hathaway Specialty Insurance Co [2026] FCAFC 87 the Full Federal Court has upheld the decision of Derrington J, [2025] FCA 1002; [2026] Lloyd's Rep IR 298. The judge considered the operation of deductibles under a liability policy where different deductibles were applicable to different claims, but all of the claims were to be aggregated as a single claim. Derrington J held that the higher of the deductibles was to be applied to the aggregate claim, a conclusion affirmed by the Full Court.

In The Russian Aircraft Litigation − Operator Policy Claims [2026] EWHC 1134 (Comm); [2026] Lloyd's Rep IR 440 Picken J considered the availability of contribution where insurer A faced primary liability to the assured and insurer B faced liability to the assured only on the contingency that insurer A failed to pay. Picken J came to the unsurprising conclusion that unless the liability of the two insurers was concurrent rather than consecutive, there was no contribution.

The lengthy and detailed judgment of Waksman J WRBC Corporate Member Ltd v AXA XL Syndicate Ltd and Others [2026] EWHC 939 (Comm) was concerned with the aggregation of Covid-19 losses of a particular class occurring in seven different jurisdictions. In each of the jurisdictions there were different measures adopted by the relevant authorities. There were two questions for the court: were the losses to be aggregated by the terms of the reinsurance treaty; and, if so, how many of them were attributable to any one event?