Santa's Best Craft, LLC v. St. Paul Fire & Marine Insurance

How courts have described this case

Verbatim parenthetical descriptions written by other courts when citing this decision. Ranked by citation-network relevance.

• holding that if “[n]o party raises a choice of law issue,” the court “appl[ies] the law of the forum state”
• noting that the court’s inquiry on a duty to defend claim “is based on the allegations in the complaint, not the legal labels attached to them”
• noting that the court’s inquiry on a duty to defend claim “is based on the allegations in the complaint, not the legal labels attached to them”
• noting that under Illi- nois law, “[i]nsurers have the burden of proving that an exclusion ap- plies,” while insureds “have the burden to prove that an exception to an exclusion restores coverage”
• explaining that Illinois courts “give little weight to the legal label that characterizes the underlying allegations” but “[i]nstead [] determine whether the alleged conduct arguably falls within at least one of the categories of wrongdoing listed in the policy”
• finding no breach of the duty to defend because the insurer timely filed a cross- motion and counterclaim seeking a declaration that it did not have a duty to defend

Source: CourtListener parenthetical corpus (CC0).