The Bermuda Form

When product and general liability insurance markets tightened in the mid-1980s, insurers designed the Bermuda Form to maintain the key features of traditional occurrence coverage and add additional features in an attempt to eliminate what insurers viewed as growing exposures and risks. Among these newly added features unique to the Bermuda Form are the so-called “integrated occurrence” provisions. Under traditional occurrence-based policies, where there is continuing injury or damage over many years, coverage is often owed on multiple policies spanning many policy years. By instead of funneling similar third-party claims into a single policy year through an “integration” process, the Bermuda Form sought to provide a more insurer-friendly construct.

Most versions of the Bermuda Form require a policyholder to formally “declare” an “integrated occurrence” when providing notice to the insurer. Whether to do so, and how to do so in a way that will capture the appropriate claims and yet not inadvertently cast too wide a net, raises many thorny considerations. Additionally, while the Bermuda Form permits a retroactive declaration that an occurrence is integrated after it had previously been declared a single occurrence, doing so likewise raises several issues that require careful consideration.