<b><i> Penn National</i></b> and the Continuing Fight over the 'Continuous Trigger' Rule

For a generation, courts have confronted difficult issues involving insurance coverage for asbestos, environmental, and other long-tail claims. A threshold problem concerns which policies are “triggered” for coverage purposes where exposure may precede manifestation of injury or other damage by many years or even decades. An approach to the trigger issue first widely adopted in asbestos coverage litigation was the so-called “continuous trigger,” or in some jurisdictions “multiple trigger,” which deems all policies in place from initial exposure through final manifestation (in some cases, death) to have been triggered, on the theory that injury from asbestos exposure is continuous through that entire period. In jurisdictions in which a continuous or multiple trigger has been used in asbestos cases, the same approach has frequently been adopted in environmental cases based on similar reasoning. Indeed, because “continuous trigger” is coverage-maximizing, policyholders have made attempts to apply the same approach in other areas, with varying degrees of success.