John W. Houghtaling II

After Superstorm Sandy, John W. Houghtaling II and other policyholder lawyers began comparing engineering reports used to decide flood claims with the field engineers' earlier work. In some cases, an initial report attributed structural damage to the storm; a later version changed the conclusion before the homeowner received it. Reviewers who had not inspected the property sometimes made those changes.

Appointed plaintiffs' liaison counsel in the Eastern District of New York in 2014, Houghtaling worked through that chain of documents: the inspection, the first report, the peer review, the version sent to the carrier and the resulting payment decision. FEMA later told Congress that Sandy litigation had produced evidence of engineering companies pressuring field engineers, changing reports without their knowledge and sending altered reports under the original engineer's name. The agency reopened review of more than 100,000 flood claims; by 2017 the review process had resulted in hundreds of millions of dollars in additional payments to policyholders.

The engineering-report dispute reached 60 Minutes and Frontline, and Houghtaling’s career was profiled on CNN’s Inside Man. In 2020 he endowed the American Policyholders Association to support insurance oversight beyond individual lawsuits and storms.

From Katrina to the Flood Program

Houghtaling had entered Gauthier & Murphy in 1996 by moving file boxes for eight dollars an hour. He became a law clerk in 1997, a lawyer in 1998 and, within his first year of practice, the firm's top-earning associate. His early matters included a $4.3 million marine wrongful-death settlement and a $6.25 million business-contract recovery. He later became managing partner and majority owner.

Hurricane Katrina changed the concentration of his practice. He litigated roughly eight hundred storm-related matters, helped obtain more than $75 million for policyholders and served as special counsel to Louisiana's attorney general on post-Katrina policyholder litigation. The claims required separating wind from flood damage, documenting emergency repairs and business interruption, and reconstructing how a carrier had valued a damaged building while New Orleans was trying to reopen.

That experience also shaped the advice he later gave Sandy homeowners: document the chronology of the damage, preserve the physical and engineering evidence, and make the carrier identify the basis for attributing a loss to an excluded cause. The claim file became the record through which the parties disputed what happened to the property and what the policy required.

The Virus Exclusion and the Policy Language

On March 16, 2020, Houghtaling filed a declaratory-judgment action for New Orleans's Oceana Grill over business-interruption coverage during the COVID-19 shutdown. He later worked with restaurateurs including Thomas Keller and helped organize the Business Interruption Group. The litigation asked whether shutdown losses fell within all-risk property policies when a form did not contain a virus exclusion.

At trial, Houghtaling relied in part on the history of a standard virus exclusion developed by the Insurance Services Office. He argued that insurance-industry representatives had previously told regulators that viral contamination could cause physical damage and sought approval of an exclusion for that risk. Discussing that evidence in 2022, he gave the statement preserved above: “I didn’t make that up. That was out of the mouths of the insurance industry.”

Outside the insurance practice, Houghtaling has also worked on large energy and infrastructure ventures. During the Deepwater Horizon spill he ran Ocean Therapy Solutions with Kevin Costner, which supplied BP with oil-separating centrifuge technology under a $167 million contract. He later co-founded an ethane-export company involved in multibillion-dollar supply agreements with China that were signed in the presence of two heads of state, and a corporate-fraud case he brought against a billionaire defendant later inspired a feature film.

Building the Claim Before the Dispute

Houghtaling now leads a property-insurance practice representing individual homeowners, commercial owners, real-estate investment trusts and property-management groups in the United States and abroad. The firm handles catastrophe, commercial-property and bad-faith matters; one of its trial results was a $49 million personal-injury verdict in 2015.

Its claim-management work begins before litigation. Engineers document physical damage, accountants develop business-interruption figures, adjusters prepare proofs of loss and lawyers track policy conditions and payment deadlines. Houghtaling's current practice uses that assembled record to press for payment or, when the claim becomes disputed, to show how the insurer's decision departed from the evidence already in the file.