After denying Society Insurance's motions to dismiss business interruption claims, the court rejected Society's motion to certify the order for an interlocutory appeal under 28 U.S.C. Sec. 1292 (b). In re Soc'y Ins. Co. COVID-19 Bus. Interruption Protection Insurance Litigation, 2021 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 111217 (N.D. Ill. June 15, 2021).     Plaintiffs brought a number of claims alleging coverage under a variety of Society's policy provisions, including coverage for interruption of business income. Society denied the claims. Suit was filed and the case was converted to multi-district litigation. Society's motions to dismiss or, in the alternative, for summary judgment, were denied in substantial part.     The court held that a covered business interruption must be caused by direct physical loss of covered property - and then the loss itself must be caused by or result from a direct physical loss. Society argued that the governmental orders - not the pandemic or the coronavirus itself- caused the suspensions of business, and that those orders did not qualify as a "direct physical loss" under the policy.     But the governing law if the various states did not impose such a strict causation requirement. Under the proximate-cause theories, a reasonable jury could find that the coronavirus and the resulting pandemic proximately caused the interruptions to plaintiffs' businesses. Further, a jury could find that the pandemic-caused shutdown orders and safety restrictions imposed physical limits on the plaintiffs' use of their physical spaces, thus qualifying their losses as "physical" even if the coronavirus itself did not caused tangible changes to the property.     Society's proposed certified question was as follows: Whether a loss of use, or a partial loss of use, of a policyholder's covered property constitutes a "direct physical loss of" covered property under the Society policy terms?     Society basically re-argued its summary judgment motion, i.e., that state law treated the interpretation of a policy and the respective rights and obligations of the insurer and the insured as questions of law that the court could resolve summarily. But equating Section 1292 (b) with summary judgment standard highlighted that Society was asking for a do-over of the summary judgment denial on the business interruption claims. Questions of contract interpretation presented in a denial of summary judgment often were particularly unsuited for interlocutory review because to decide whether summary judgment was properly granted required hunting through the record complied in the summary judgment proceeding to see whether there could be a genuine issued of material fact lurking there.     For these reasons, Society's issue did not present the sort of "question of law" contemplated by section 1292 (b).     

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