Manifestation Trigger

For most insurance transactions, the timeline of events is pretty clear. Your car got rear-ended last Tuesday, May 23rd. No ambiguity about when the event took place.

However, not everything has timing that unfolds in such a clear-cut manner.

The land under your house has been eroding for decades, but so slowly that you can't notice it on a day-to-day basis. But your house is slowly (almost imperceptibly) sinking. Meanwhile, you've changed insurance companies a few times over the year. Now, only your roof peeks out over the crater, and you have to crawl out of the chimney like a reverse Santa Claus to get to work in the morning.

You finally call your insurance company. But it's not easy to figure out just "when" the event took place. The house has been slowly sinking for decades. At what point did the house become "sunken?" Or, more relevant to the insurance company's concern, who pays?

The insurance industry relies on a handful of legal theories to untangle these situations. The "manifestation trigger" is one of these.

The manifestation trigger says that the event officially takes place when the damage manifests itself, i.e. when you can see it. So, whenever it was clear your house had sunk, that's the date the damage officially took place, at least from the insurance company's perspective.

Think of it in terms of another example: termite damage. The little buggers have been eating away behind your walls for years. But you don't notice it until you try to hang a picture and half your wall comes down. That hammer blow, revealing that there's loads of damage below the surface, starts the insurance clock under manifestation theory.

There are three other theories that compete with manifestation theory: Exposure Theory, Injury-in-Fact Theory, and Continuous Trigger Theory.