A California woman living in a house her mother owned lost all of her personal and business property, plus her workplace, when a wildfire destroyed the home. She sued her mother’s insurance agent when she learned there was no insurance coverage for her.
The woman moved from Alaska to California in October 2013 and began living alone in her mother’s house. Months later, she began operating a cosmetic tattoo-related business there.
When she first moved in, she spoke in-person with her mother’s insurance agent. She told the agent that she was moving her personal belongings to her mother’s house and wanted to know if they would be covered by her mother’s homeowners insurance policy. The agent supposedly answered yes. In the fall of 2014, she spoke with the agent again, telling her about the tattoo business and asking whether her mother’s policy would cover her business property. Again, the agent allegedly told her it would.
In August 2017, her mother, who was beginning to show symptoms of dementia, asked the agent to replace the homeowners policy with a landlord’s policy. The agent did so. As the daughter was not a named insured on either policy, she was never informed of the change.
In November 2018, the Camp Fire destroyed the home. The insurance company paid the mother the $392,480 dwelling limit under the landlord policy. However, they denied all coverage for the daughter’s personal and business property. She had claimed a loss of more than $400,000.
The following summer, she sued the agent, the insurer, and two utilities for her loss. Regarding the agent and insurer, she claimed negligent misrepresentation for allegedly telling her she had coverage and professional negligence for not advising her to buy a renter’s policy.
The COVID-19 pandemic appears to have delayed court proceedings, as it was not until March 2022 that the agent and insurer asked the trial court for summary judgment in their favor. Summary judgment is a ruling based on the law when there is no dispute over the facts. The court subsequently granted the motion and ruled in the agent’s and insurer’s favor. The daughter appealed the ruling.
In a January 2025 decision, the appellate judges sided with the agent and insurer. First, they said the agent’s conversations with the daughter in 2013 and 2014 were about the homeowners policy, but by the time of the loss, that policy had been replaced with a landlord’s policy. Therefore, anything the agent may have said about the homeowners policy was irrelevant because it was no longer in effect when the fire occurred.
The daughter argued that her mother was not in her right mind when she replaced the homeowner’s policy and lacked the capacity to do so. Since the daughter was not informed of the change, she argued that her reliance on what she was told earlier was reasonable. However, the court noted prior testimony that the mother was still making her own decisions at the time of the replacement and that the daughter was not reviewing her bills or insurance documents. Therefore, they ruled that there was no dispute over whether the mother validly replaced the policy.
Lastly, they ruled that the agent did not owe any legal duties to the daughter. The daughter was not the agent’s client; the mother was. Consequently, they awarded judgment in favor of the agent and insurer. This decision was rendered in late January 2025, so there is no record of further proceedings. Having lost twice, it seems unlikely that the daughter will prevail before the state’s highest court.
If the daughter’s testimony about her conversations with the agent is true, the agent did give her bad information. A typical homeowners policy will not insure the belongings of someone living in the home who is not an insured. A renter’s policy with in-home business coverage would have properly insured the daughter, and the agent should have suggested that. For lack of an inexpensive renter’s policy, the two sides ended up in extensive litigation. Selling more insurance often prevents errors and omissions liability lawsuits; it certainly would have in this case.
