Georgia's appeals court just handed insurance brokers a serious E&O headache, reviving a widow's negligence suit over a fatal shooting and a coverage gap.
In a decision dated May 12, 2026, the Court of Appeals of Georgia revived Stephanie Plummer's lawsuit against Commercial Insurance Agency, the broker she blames for failing to secure proper liability cover for the property owner whose store was the site of her husband's murder.
The case began in August 2019, when Plummer's husband was shot and killed at a store owned and operated by Henry Properties, Inc. CIA had helped Henry Properties obtain a general liability policy through Colony Insurance Company, running from March 2019 to March 2020. The policy excluded liability for bodily injury caused by assault, battery, or the use of firearms.
Plummer sued the store owner for premises liability in DeKalb County in 2021. Colony then went to federal court in the Northern District of Georgia and won a ruling that the policy did not cover the claim. With no insurance to draw on, Henry Properties and Plummer cut a deal – a $1 million consent judgment in Plummer's favor, which she agreed not to enforce against the company. In exchange, Henry Properties assigned its claims against the broker to Plummer.
Plummer then sued CIA in Gwinnett County for negligence, breach of fiduciary duty, punitive damages and litigation expenses, arguing the broker should have placed a policy that actually responded to a shooting. CIA moved to dismiss, pointing to OCGA § 44-12-24, which bars assigning a right of action for personal torts, legal malpractice, or fraud-based injuries. The trial court agreed and threw out the case with prejudice.
The appeals court disagreed. Writing for a unanimous panel, Judge Padgett drew a line between an injury to a person and an injury to property. A personal tort, the court explained, involves an injury to the person, to the reputation, or to feelings – as opposed to damage to real or personal property, which is a property tort.
The complaint, the court said, did not allege CIA injured Henry Properties personally. It alleged the company suffered pecuniary loss because CIA failed to secure an appropriate insurance policy. That makes it a property tort, and property torts can change hands.
The panel also batted away CIA's warning that the ruling would gut Georgia's bar on assigning personal torts because almost every tort can be measured in money damages. The broker, the court said, was conflating the injury with the remedy. Money damages are how you measure a loss; they do not define the tort.
For brokers and their E&O carriers, the implication is hard to miss. A failure-to-procure claim in Georgia can now travel with a consent judgment, letting a plaintiff who cannot collect from an underinsured defendant chase the broker that allegedly left the coverage gap. Plummer's punitive damages claim is gone – she conceded it was not assignable – but her negligence, breach of fiduciary duty and litigation expenses claims are headed back to the trial court.
