Indiana's Court of Appeals just erased a $10 million pollution coverage win against an excess insurer – all on a single choice-of-law call.
On May 13, 2026, the Court of Appeals of Indiana reversed a trial court ruling that had ordered North River Insurance Company to pay Landis+Gyr Technology, Inc. more than $10 million for cleaning up decades-old TCE contamination at a manufacturing site in Lafayette, Indiana.
The site at 3601 Sagamore Parkway North traces back to the early 1950s, when Duncan Electric Company started manufacturing operations there and used solvents including trichloroethylene. A Landis entity acquired Duncan in 1976. Contamination was discovered in 1983, though the opinion says it had been occurring since around 1974. The cleanup didn't wrap up until 2017.
That year, Landis went to North River, which had written three excess liability policies covering it from February 1976 through October 1978. Landis put the remediation tab at roughly $7.6 million. RiverStone Claims Management handled the claim for North River. Landis separately settled with its other carriers, Liberty Mutual and Zurich.
The North River claim never settled. Landis sued in 2021, alleging breach of contract, bad faith, repudiation, civil conspiracy and concert of action, and seeking a declaratory judgment. The trial court sided with Landis on coverage and entered judgment of $10,860,423.10 – the $7.6 million plus 8% interest, minus a $6,230,000 credit for the other insurer settlements.
The appeal came down to allocation: which insurance years pay, and how much.
The North River policies define ultimate net loss using all-sums language, requiring the insurer to pay all sums the insured is legally obligated to pay for covered property damage. Under Indiana law, per Allstate Ins. Co. v. Dana Corp., that language lets the insured collect its full liability from any triggered policy up to limits. That reading favors Landis.
But the same policies define occurrence to include damage during the policy period. Under New York law, per Consolidated Edison Co. v. Allstate Ins. Co., that language generally triggers pro rata allocation – spreading the loss across all damage years. Divide $7.6 million by 10 years of contamination (1974 through 1983), and each year carries about $760,000 in costs. That falls below the $1 million attachment point on the North River excess policies. Under that math, North River owes nothing.
Landis leaned on In re Viking Pump, Inc., a later New York decision saying all-sums allocation can still apply despite policy-period language if the policy also carries a non-cumulation clause – which generally prevents an insured from stacking limits across consecutive policies covering the same long-tail loss. The Court of Appeals wasn't buying it. The North River policies don't include non-cumulation clauses. Landis argued the North River wording should be interpreted alongside other policies from the same years that did include such clauses. The court refused, finding no authority that lets another insurer's wording rewrite North River's.
Landis also pointed to other-insurance language in the policies' retained limit section. The court rejected that too, noting Viking Pump treated those clauses as relevant only when two policies cover the same period - not when policies sit back to back across years.
With Indiana and New York law clearly in conflict, the court ran the choice-of-law test from National Union Fire Insurance Co. of Pittsburgh, PA v. Standard Fusee Corp. For insurance contracts, the analysis starts with the principal location of the insured risk. From 1976 to 1978, New York had the most insured sites - five, against two in Indiana, two in Ohio, and one each in California and Florida.
Three more factors favored New York. Landis was incorporated and headquartered there, used a New York insurance broker, and listed a New York address on the applications. North River's New York office handled underwriting and negotiation. Only the place of performance – Indiana, where the cleanup happened - pointed the other way, and the court gave it little weight because that location was uncertain when the policies were written.
Four out of five contacts pointed to New York. The court applied New York law, applied pro rata allocation, and held Landis's damages don't reach the North River excess policies. The trial court ruling was reversed and the case sent back with instructions to enter summary judgment for North River and RiverStone on all of Landis's claims.
The court also brushed aside Landis's argument that North River had repudiated the policies by entering a reinsurance agreement and using RiverStone as a third-party claims administrator. The court called the argument hard to follow and noted Landis's own experts saw nothing improper about either arrangement.
