Virginia Lawyers Weekly

The Supreme Court of Virginia ruled last Thursday that a girl badly injured in a car wreck can “stack” the uninsured/underinsured insurance coverage in her father’s auto policy, increasing the potential amount of money available for her injury.

In the case, the girl’s lawyer was able to distinguish the language in the father’s policy from the wording used in a bellwether stacking case from 1981. He did it by locating the original policy from that case, which had been lying in a court file for nearly 30 years.

And this case may open a significant opportunity for the plaintiff’s bar, at least until insurance companies tighten up their policy language.

“Stacking” is the way for an insured person to claim the benefit of all the policy limits on all the vehicles in a policy. Here, the father had three cars insured by Virginia Farm Bureau for a maximum of $850,000 in coverage.

Stacking is permitted under Virginia law, but the Supreme Court in a 1981 case, Goodville Mutual Cas. Co. v. Borror, 221 Va. 967, said that stacking can be prohibited so long as certain language is used.

Stacking battles were common in the late 1980s, as carriers sought to put the Goodville prohibitions into common use.
The Virginia Farm Bureau case is the high court’s first stacking decision on an auto policy in many years.

The argument before the court was a technical one, turning on policy language, noted Virginia Beach John G. Crandley, who handled the appeal for the plaintiff’s family.

He said that he was able to locate the original policy in the Goodville case, which was still in a file in Rockingham Circuit Court.
He asked the high court to make the Goodville file part of the record in this case; he was able to place the Goodville policy side by side with the Farm Bureau policy, and to argue why stacking should be allowed in this particular case.

The strategy worked. The court’s analysis in Virginia Farm Bureau Mut. Ins. Co. v. Williams (VLW 009-6-074) is largely a comparison of what worked in Goodville” to the circumstances here.

The prohibitions that stopped stacking were only in the uninsured, or UM, endorsement in Goodville, Crandley noted.

But the Farm Bureau UM endorsement doesn’t contain the controlling language and refers the reader to a declarations page.

Justice Barbara Milano Keenan, writing for the unanimous court, noted that ambiguities in insurance policies are strictly construed against the carrier that wrote the policy.

What does the case mean for the trial bar?

Crandley said that plaintiff’s lawyers probably should be looking at the UM endorsements and other policy language more closely after this case.

“There may be policies out there at significant variance with” the language that worked in Goodville, he added.

There is likely “a window of litigation” that has opened for the plaintiff’s bar, at least until the insurance companies read this case and tighten their policy language accordingly, Crandley noted.

Richmond lawyer Justin Gravatt, counsel for Virginia Farm Bureau, could not be reached for comment.

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