For the third time in four years, The National Law Journal has named Anderson Kill's Insurance Recovery Group a finalist in Insurance in its 2025 Elite Trial Lawyers awards. The firm was a Finalist in 2024 and 2022.

The National Law Journal Legal Awards highlight the top litigation and appellate work from the previous year.

In its nomination submission, Anderson Kill spotlighted its work in Radiac Adhesives v. Hartford Insurance Company, filed in August 2020 in New Jersey Superior Court, Essex County, against ten insurance companies for coverage for environmental cleanup in excess of $30 million at a former facility now used as a day care center in Verona, NJ.

The issues in dispute included:

• missing policies
• trigger of coverage
• allocation among insurance companies and
• whether a former parent company, M&R Industries, had the ability to release insurance companies that had covered Radiac in the relevant policy periods from lability.

On Aug. 26, 2024 the Superior Court of New Jersey, Essex County granted summary judgment to Radiac Abrasives Inc. with respect to cross-motions hinging on Radiac’s rights to historic insurance policies under which M&R previously had settled for a different environmental cleanup site.

Radiac successfully argued that M&R had no right to negate its historic insurance coverage, that the M&R settlement agreements did not bind Radiac by their express terms, and that New Jersey law did not permit one insured to settle away the rights of other insureds without consent. The court held that Radiac’s claims were not released by the 2000 settlement agreement executed by Radiac’s former corporate parent.

The nomination also focused on Anderson Kill’s representation of The Doe Fund, a nonprofit providing housing to the homeless and other at-risk individuals, seeking defense for three suits claiming that individuals contracted Legionnaires’ Disease from bacteria emitted from a cooling tower on Doe Fund properties. (The Doe Fund v. Berkley Insurance Company, filed in 2022 in the Southern District of New York). Berkley denied coverage, citing a communicable disease exclusion.

On March 8, 2024, the SDNY court granted partial summary judgment to Doe, finding that Berkley must defend the suits. Citing a dictionary definition, the court concluded that Legionnaires’ Disease is not communicable. The court noted that while the state health code designates Legionnaires’ Disease as an “infectious, contagious or communicable disease,” it does not specify that the disease is communicable – i.e., spread by human-to-human contact.

The final awards selections will be announced in July.