No Negligent Procurement Unless Risk of Loss Was Foreseeable at Time Insured Sought Policy
Skip to the final paragraph of Ralph v. Pipkin to see what the case stands for. In the last paragraph, the Court of Appeals notes that in a case against an agent or broker for negligent procurement, as in any negligence case, the plaintiff must establish the foreseeability of harm. In a negligent procurement case, that means that the insured’s loss must have been a foreseeable risk at the time that the insured was seeking coverage. If the loss was not foreseeable, then the agent or broker had no duty to obtain coverage for that loss.
Note that other Tennessee cases state that a defendant only needs to be capable of foreseeing “a harm of a like general character,” not the specific injury that the plaintiff suffered. Moon v. St. Thomas Hosp., 983 S.W.2d 225 (Tenn. 1998). That does not change the result in Ralph, because the plaintiff would still have to prove that the insurance agent should have foreseen by 1998 that a farmer needed coverage for something akin to patent infringement.
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