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LPC Law Notes Commercial and IP Notes

Insurance Contracts Notes

Updated Insurance Contracts Notes

Commercial and IP Notes

Commercial and IP

Approximately 100 pages

A collection of the best LPC Commercial and IP notes the director of Oxbridge Notes (an Oxford law graduate) could find after combing through twenty-nine LPC samples from outstanding students with the highest results in England and carefully evaluating each on accuracy, formatting, logical structure, spelling/grammar, conciseness and "wow-factor".

In short these are what we believe to be the strongest set of CLIP notes available in the UK this year. This collection of notes is fully updated fo...

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The following is a more accessible plain text extract of the PDF sample above, taken from our Commercial and IP Notes. Due to the challenges of extracting text from PDFs, it will have odd formatting:

Commercial Law

Insurance Law

Basic principles of insurance law

  • Client enters into an Insurance Contract – to manage risk!

  • Contracts of utmost good faith: insurer has to be made aware of all material information. Imposes duty on the client to refrain from making a misrepresentation of material facts.

  • Both insurer and insured have a duty to disclose every material fact affecting the risk before the contract is concluded. [Disclose even if the insurer has not asked for the information]

Exceptions =

  • Material facts = a fact that would influence the judgment of a prudent insurer in fixing the premium or determining whether he will take the risk [Mis-rep Act S.20(2)]

  • The insured must have a “insurable interest”

Components of a Standard Insurance policy:

Operative clause

  • Extent of cover

  • Circumstances in which the insurance will become operative

  • The Cover provided
Exclusions

  • Restrictions on the insurance cover

Warranties

Nb. Warranties are treated as conditions in Insurance policies

  • Client may be required to warrant certain facts

  • Strict compliance

  • Breach of warranty = insurer can avoid insurance policy [insurer can treat his liability at an end].

  • Breach of disclosure warranty = The contract is valid and binding until it is avoided. It can then be treated as VOID from its beginning – allowing insurer to refuse to deal with any claim arising from the start of period of insurance cover. Courts try to restrict this remedy.

Gottleib: remedy available to insurers for a fraudulent claim is forfeiture of the relevant claim, rather than avoidance of the whole contract.

Fraud Act 2006 S.3: dishonestly fail to disclose to another person information which they are under a legal duty to disclose and they intended, by that failure to disclose, to make a gain for themselves or cause a loss to another / expose another to risk of loss.

  • Requires clear drafting – [i.e. Basis of the contract clause – any pre-contract representation will be treated as a condition of the contract. Breach will allow the insurer to terminate the contract for an inaccurate representation [i.e. Policy can be avoided even if it was a innocent misrepresentation. Does not have to be a material representation in order for insurer to avoid]. Courts don’t generally like this!

  • Non-disclosure is harder for insurer to rely on to successfully avoid contract. Harder to prove!
Terms and conditions

  • Conditions precedent to the RISK: must be fulfilled before the insurer takes on risk [e.g. pay premium].

Non compliance = bar to claim

  • Conditions precedent to the LIABILITY: insurer has already taken on risk but the condition must still be adhered to – e.g. Insured must take reasonable care to avoid loss; claim must be submitted within 14 days

Non compliance = bar to claim

  • Conditions subsequent: simple contractual terms

Duty of utmost good faith:

  • 2 obligations = to refrain from making a misrepresentation AND to disclose material facts even if no question is asked.

  • Breach for misrepresentations: insurer can avid the policy whether or not the proposer was aware that the fact was incorrect.

  • Breach for failure to disclose: insurer can ONLY avoid the policy if the proposer was both aware of the fact and ought to have realised that the insurer would regard it as material.

  • Continuing duty: there is a debate about this.

Misrepresentation:

  • S.20(2) MA 1967

  • Pan Atlantic case: A material circumstance is one that would have an effect on the mind of the prudent insurer in assessing the risk. It is not necessary for the circumstances to have a decisive effect on the insurer’s acceptance of the risk or on the premium charge.

  • Insurer must show that he was induced by the...

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