By Tom Stilp, JD, MBA/MM, LLM, MSC, DBA • July 15, 2026
Professor Linzer writes contracts have become evil, used for bad ends and allow a distribution of power favoring shrewd businesses like insurance companies to force agreement (which is to say, no real agreement) and capitalize on the romantic notion of freedom of contract (Linzer, 2015).
Insurance companies offer Frankenstein contracts in policies of insurance. What we are left with today are policies that are not read (too long and too complicated), with terms that cannot be changed, and used for evil ends (Linzer, 2015), requiring increasing premium payments as coverage declines.
It gets worse. We now have “unilateral, post-contractual modifications,” meaning the insurance company may change the terms of an agreement without the customer’s real consent. In a real example, a client received a notice from a major insurance carrier stating the following:
“If your policy is renewed, it may be issued with one or more of the following changes which restricts [sic] coverage:”
Then the notice lists a number of changes to the Policy, such as the following: “Amend CG 21 44 Limitation of Coverage to Designated Premises, Project or Operation – ‘None’ is added to the Project Or [sic] Operation Schedule.”
What?! This is just gibberish. Aside from the grammatical errors, the notice is designed to be gibberish, nonsensical, and almost impossible to understand.
However, as experienced counsel, we can read insurance policies. It turns out the actual provision appears in “CG 21 44 04 17” which is different from the citation provided by the insurance company.
Rather than deal with deliberate ambiguity, misdirection, and gibberish, a better option is to rely on experienced counsel. We have helped clients navigate incomprehensible policies of insurance, and when the initial position of the insurance company was that coverage did not exist, and no payment would be made, we have had courts award benefits to our client.
References
Linzer, P. (2015). Contract as evil. Hastings Law Journal, 66, 971- 1010.
