Comcast Spectacor Renews Call to Consolidate COVID Insurance Cases
Contrary to the opposition of defendant Factory Mutual Insurance to plaintiff Comcast Spectacor’s July 4 motion to reassign the lawsuit so it can be related to two other COVID-19 insurance cases, Spectacor said “relatedness does not require the moving party…
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to show that a new case and a prior filed case involve identical parties.” Spectacor filed its omibus reply Thursday (docket 2:23-cv-02476) in further support of its motion for reassignment to U.S. District Judge Michael Baylson for Eastern Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. Philadelphia Flyers owner Spectacor alleges in its June 28 complaint that Factory Mutual refuses to honor the terms of the property insurance policy the team bought to protect against the type of “catastrophic loss” it incurred when its games were canceled or curtailed at the Wells Fargo Center in 2020 and 2021 due to the COVID-19 pandemic (see 2306290001). One of the related cases before Baylson’s court was brought against Factory Mutual by the Philadelphia Eagles. The Eastern District of Pennsylvania recognizes that cases are related under Local Rule 40.1 when they share a “core of similarity,” and the underlying claims are based on the same “central events,” said Spectacor. When those principles “are applied to the circumstances presented here,” there “should be no doubt” that the Flyers action is related to the earlier-filed Eagles action, it said. Factory Mutual would have the court believe that nothing “would warrant having these two cases assigned to a single judge, when multiple other COVID coverage cases have been heard by multiple judges” in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania. But these cases “share a unique core of similarity that should weigh heavily in favor” of granting the Flyers’ reassignment motion, it said. Both actions are asserted “by major league sports teams against an identical insurance company defendant, Factory Mutual, and both seek to enforce identical and unique insurance policy language,” it said.