No coverage where underlying complaint specified an unscheduled location.
Lorenzo v. Capitol Indemnity Corp., (No. 1-09-1862, First Dist., May 21, 2010), is at first blush the flipside of Chandler v. Doherty, 299 Ill.App.3d 797 (1998). In Chandler (where I represented the carrier), the court found a duty to defend for a car accident even though the carrier had rejected coverage for the involved car (while covering the insured's other car) because the underlying complaint alleged only that the insured was operating a "motor vehicle." In effect, the court found a duty to defend because the complaint did not affirmatively preclude coverage.
In Lorenzo, the policy scheduled 15 of the insured's locations, but the tort complaint identified an unscheduled location as the site of the occurrence, food poisoning. The insured argued that the tort complaint's general allegations that the insured did "process, prepare, distribute, sell and/or otherwise place into the stream of commerce certain foods [including the offending food] for purchase by the consumer public" potentially implicated one or more of the scheduled locations as the policy covered injury arising out of the "ownership, maintenance, or use of the premises shown in the schedule, and operations necessary or incidental to those premises...."
However, the court affirmed a finding of no duty to defend because the complaint specified the location where the food poisoning occurred. In doing so, the court analogized to a hypothetical Chandler complaint that identified the car at issue, under which the court suggested there would have been no coverage.
That is correct but inapposite. Per Chandler, and considering the general allegations at issue in Lorenzo, the complaint there did not affirmatively preclude coverage. What the Lorenzo court actually held is that a complaint's specific allegations precluding coverage will trump general allegations that could otherwise have raised a potential for coverage.
