please the court good morning your honor is my name is bert say checked in with me as we need to kirsty and together we represent shawn and eric murphy in their case against state farm insurance company the underlying facts are really relatively simple there was a fire in the off the unit building that the murphy's law and over in the wicker park area during the time the fire occurred they had an insurance policy with state farm and they brought a claim against state farm to pay for the policy and in its reaction to that there was a sworn testimony taken of the murphys them they explained that they indeed had an under contract to demolish the building and it had been that way for approximately six months and they were leaning heavily towards having the building demolished and to cut to the end of the story we filed suit of actually took over their pro se complaint and after several years of litigation the issue of whether the murphy interest was alleged by state farm and we responded citing probably the very limited laws that exist but we will be the best law on the subject which was by the seventh circuit court of appeals applying illinois law that explained what we think is a very bright line simple rule that should apply in the case of whether somebody has a insurable interest in property in the case that we chose was the one th fifty exactly on point dealt with that issue the only issue which is when a person has a demolition contract on a building do they nonetheless have an insurable interest in the property so that if  is destroyed while the contract is finding can they be entitled to recover under the policy and the answer that the supreme or the seventh circuit came up with after looking at illinois law on the subject in the law of the land across the country was wh yes indeed of course you should have an issue of interest and of course the insurance policy to pay for that you wanted to have in force should in fact apply you should be entitled to get payment for what occurred and the reasoning is i think relatively self evident which is the power sees an effect until the building ceases to have any existence and egypt well as long as the building is still has a useful existence and thankfully we're not before this court arguing a point that's quite so pushed down on the chain of what actually occurred but the majority of courts it's the address that specific issue say that it not only does it still have an interval interest if it can be stopped it might not even be relevant that the trial except for the fact that one of the damages what's the value of partially demolished building worth or the value of what was destroyed in a partially demolished building but in a case like ours where you have a completely free standing building and the only thing that you can say about it is at the present time it had no tenets that it wasn't being let to anybody it existed and the movies were leaning towards which was different and i felt thing i  the demolition and nonetheless the court said look there's a natural interest here and we were still part of a twenty six thousand dollars worth of goods you know there was and that's an interesting point because it was something that we've never even  addressed because it was never even raised in the summary judgment issue which is what was the value of all the property that was still in the murphys building and without having put numbers on it i mean we did reference in our briefs a considerable amount of things that they at which actually do have the sa e value the cabinetry the waterfront misses the heaters the dishwashers the dryers and things of that nature in fact the murphys as they've said they were definitely leaning towards rewriting the property but the fact that all that property was still in there including all the windows were still up which they were leaning to why they were planning towards demolishing the building i was happy but they they had never given up the idea maybe would stop and will go back and re read that it was a period of time during the real estate industry worse than it is today and they hadn't decided for sure they hadn't committed for sure what they wanted to do to the property and i think that's evident from the fact that the owner of the demolition company looked at the contract and he said yes indeed you know i had a binding contract with these people but anything that existed on the property cruncher it provided nothing for the wreck and he admitted the owner of the company admitted that where the merc used to back out that was the end of a chapter five hundred dollars and have a good day it's different th in a building of that size is going to be considerable reclaimed materials or recycled materials things that either get factored into what the cost of the trick would be when you determine how much you want them i'll ship much the way that a company that's doing recycling for the city of chicago or any company and he said would say well how much are we going to gain from reselling isam will base our bid on how much it cost to demolish it so that the general fact is that although perhaps it's impossible for me to stand here and give you a rule that would say when can you definitely say that a contract is irrevocable that you can't go forward it's nothing like the contract that was issued here demolition had started actually it was signed in six months later the m still have a sign out front of the building that the trying to sell it they're still actively contemplating whether they're doing the right thing the demolition owner having started because for whatever reason he knew that there was some reason that to go for image it was a significant amount of the energy didn't destroy the building but it was enough that they made a claim on their insurance policy and the issue of whether there was a natural interest up point out was so dicey i think for the insurance company to issue here that the original complaint was filed my goodness at least five or six years before the insurance company even got the notion of saying let's raise an offense to the litigation the fact that they don't have  the case on the other affirmative defenses that they've raised but i think that the way the average someone when i think it should read is if there is a chance that these people will not demolish the building then we don't want the jury to have to sit there and pontificate well was there a six percent chance that they were going to go forward and if so should we reduce if they fight in our favor should we reduce the damages by the ad about the law as person or explained it or at least as  the other states that addressed that particular issue said if there if there's a chance that they weren't going to demolish it they haven't insurable interest and to allow the jurors them to decide how much he amaj to the property was caused based on what was the likelihood of the demolition of the property from that it different as it is but that's why i think that you should be entering partial summary judgment on the count three of the affirmative defense which i there isn't a reason to to get to that issue i think what you're talking about is a summary determination of major issue under two channel for d c it's not a partial summary just a partial summary judgment is if the circuit court enters it should occur to change to correct saw it straight out way happy if you simply say look under the only law where there really isn't any specific law on this exact point if you damage to the property i think that would be happy with that and we'll go back and deal with it but what i think it's mucked up is that the defendant raises an issue about the definition of insurable interest and that they cite a bunch of cases that address it in a different point to get to the idea of did the plaintiffs suffer some lost profit by not having the building or did they set her some sort of disadvantage as a result of the damage and i think that to look at it that way that's where i said that's all those issues come into what is insurable in trista know when you look at specifically in the context of a demolition patrick the courts them focus all of the points and say here's what we need whether you have an interest or not in it and a property that you're going to demolish if it isn't started if it isn't irrevocable you still have an insurable interest and i find out that i think when they say the old cases that are cited about the insurable interest meaning if you lose a profit of course if we were to simply be limited to where the murphys from i think that the building at the time that it was destroyed no they were just like somebody that has a valuable piece of jewelry and puts it in a home safe and has no plans to sell it and if it gets turned on the last did they lose some profit by not being able to use it of course and what they lost was their property and it should be self evident that just because they were using that piece of jewelry to make a profit doesn't mean that they didn't lose something that was valuable when the property was stolen and that's how i think when they talk about an achievable interest and use it the way that they try to in the context of demolition country it kind of confuses the issue insurable interest in the way that they're talking about is ought to take out an insurance policy on my neighbor's car and the question would be well what doest do i suffered his cars destroyed not what disadvantage to experience if his car is destroyed not and it comes up often in the context of things like b adequate settlements where they sell the insurance policy for somebody that's terminally ill to another person and some states have gone to the extreme a saying that the person that bought that policy from the original owner doesn't have a natural interest because they suffer no loss when that person dies it's quite specifically to their death etc but when we're talking about something like a vacant building and i hesitate to use the word vacant because it wasn't completely empty it just was unoccupied and so if we're talking about an unoccupied building when there's damage to it by fire that was a stream as we allege it was these people suffer a loss it's their property whether they were using it for anything that created profit at the time or whether they were letting it lay fallow for a time shouldn't change the fact i think that the last thing that the courts of illinois should be doing is getting into some sort of an analysis of the somebody who owns property  really like that property enough that they should be entitled to receive money because of its destruction when it was insured do they really have some benefit that they would have used because then we're getting into speculation as to what are these people  time that they did their sworn testimony before they had an attorney to time through the depositions of themselves in the case they have never wavered from the idea that they hemmed in they are the hesitated and asked themselves were we making the right decision and the one thing that happened is the ability to make any decisions other than demolish it were taken away from them when the insurance company did not want to pay for the damage because i honestly what do you do when you have a building where you set the tenants away from and  experience a sixty thousand dollars loss at the building and the insurance company says we're not going to pay for any of the repairs on that building and you have two choices you can say well we were thinking about demolishing it and i guess why not just go forward then because the alternative is in a tight economy when you have no money we got to come up with sixty thousand dollars to get back to the point of what we were going to do thank you what they actually look at is is this a factor whether there is an increase and if there is suffered by the destruction by the demolition or there's a fire loss that occurs where the and waning between the options i think if you read their actual testimony they specifically go through it and tell you that they were doing leases because they planned on tearing down the property holdup they talk about the the actual timing of the actual demolition was a week after the fire and that's page three fifty two of the record yes they can change their mind i don't think that's the case here i don't think they were going to change their mind i think that the evidence there really isn't going to be true or she talks in terms of your necessarily the fact that they have and with a couple committed to doing this but rather they are going to continue to gain a benefit from this property they're not doing that they're not getting rental income in fact the opposite they're bright enough to be getting no point in time so i think there is nothing there's no proof of any evidence no proof of anything of actual value inside the home and i think that goes to the point of there being no insurable interest at the time of the actual loss is insurance there there should not be a pay and ability were a person to have an interest in running to destroy property if there is no actual  he's destroyed by fire or something to the point of this building did not have any value and again i think that that that show that shown by the fact that the tenants around the building that there is no gas there is no where there's no electricity there's no items of value inside the spirit the building these plants are not residing in this property so that property itself to these planes to these specific plainest has no value to them and pursuant to illinois case law because of that itself and again i think if you go through the actual testimony they they talk i threw out about the fact that they are going to demolish this property and again i think it's misleading to say that they that they were were waxing and waning they talk about  and this is mostly in their examinations under oath which take place much closer the time to fire than their depositions when they're represented by an attorney but they talk about they're not actively running property because they're in the process of demolishing it they're going to check a building down at the time of the fire their answers to interactive tori's when asked specifically point blank well what was the use of the building prior to the fire their answer simply that they were going to demolish that property there is no other answer within those interact both plans that they were going to do anything other than the last property that's what they intended that's what they were going to do the plan of points out that there was this contract for demolition and usually these demolition contracts and the demolition o yesterday that the question wrote something is holding this up and in the examination under oath of murphy tells you what's holding this up they're waiting up for him it's from the city he has an architect he's hired not protect to build plants for this property they have they had verbal agreements with contractors or the building of this property and they have a nearly a million dollar construction went to sit so again to say that that this isn't a real irreproachable i think defies in the face of watching in this instance they were definitely going to demolish this place they had taken numerous steps down that path to demolishing this property at the time of the actual loss itself they could not show  course the garcia court case is that insurable interest is around if the building has a useful existence again in this instance there is no useful existence this is that this building yes there clearly a three points that like through press one is i think that the facts are being pushed to a point that they really aren't they don't warrant the idea that we had written patrick verbal contracts with ash records etc i don't think we're going to find anything more than my clients had spoken with people about what would be involved in building a home that was different than the one was there that was the money if they were to demolish it the evidence just doesn't support that herbal contract for this sort of thing and here's the reason why unmodifiable any time somebody makes the first amount of investigation into what they want to do there are vacant properties all over the city right now that were foreclosed upon or owned by the lenders that held the mortgages and it's undeniable that these homes are being sold they're being sold for amounts that are more than zero these they can homes have value in and of themselves just because they are existing structure this bill that had a value in and of itself because it was an existing structure there were items in there that had a value that could have been sold i really think objection to the argument when my opponent argues that it was our burden to show that these things had a value this was  for summary judgment not a trial it's their burden to show that there was no value here there was no motion in their motion about these items hit the value is that the factual evidence supported they certainly might have made some sort of conclusory statement with something that tells you what they're basing the conclusion that there's no value and there wasn't anything in there the other point that i think it's really not worth the is the the argument boils down to what i heard my opponent you know say actually his words were i don't think that they intended to do anything to tear the building down got it that's what he thinks that's what the insurance company thinks and that's why they don't want to pay out but we're not sitting at the insurance company we're sitting in a court of law and the issue is but what is the evidence show and we have a trial or fact in this case the trial effect is a jury and we ask that the jury be allowed to decide do they agree with him his view that is biased perhaps in favor of his client not unlike my view is biased in favor of my clients but let's let the impartial people say let me hear what these people have to say let me look at their prior statements and see if i really think that they intended to demolish the building or if they were uncertain what they wanted to do because if they were uncertain there's really no reason that the building should not be an issue it just like a building that you might leave you moving to another state you turn off the power you turn off the electricity and you stop having the mail forwarded there it doesn't cease having a value and it doesn't cease being her building it if you have an insurance policy on it posit that it should still be insured should it get destroyed even though you're doing nothing with the property it's yours you have a right to sell it if you choose even the we're thinking about doing something different and i think it's going to be a really really devastating situation both for assurance and more people in illinois if the fact that you ever mention to anybody that you're thinking about doing one thing that that means that your flock can't argue differently than anybody ever did a right to rely on your insurance because