Background
Peter O’Rourke worked as a Verizon technician in the proactive maintenance department. For three consecutive years, he was assigned the same Verizon bucket truck, held his own set of keys, and used it exclusively during his shifts to travel between his Verizon facility in Warwick and job sites across the East Bay area. On February 8, 2018, while driving the bucket truck to a maintenance assignment in Tiverton, he was rear-ended and injured. He could not use the truck for personal errands, take it home, or use it for “joyriding,” but he was the sole driver on any day he worked.
O’Rourke sought uninsured/underinsured motorist (UIM) benefits under his personal Nationwide auto policy, which covered bodily injury caused by an uninsured driver. Nationwide denied the claim, invoking the policy’s “regular use” exclusion, which bars UIM coverage for injuries sustained while occupying a non-owned vehicle “furnished for the regular use” of the insured but not insured for auto liability under the policy. O’Rourke filed suit in Providence County Superior Court seeking a declaratory judgment that Nationwide breached the contract.
A hearing justice denied Nationwide’s first motion for summary judgment in 2021, concluding that reasonable minds could differ on whether the bucket truck constituted a “regular use” vehicle—a factual question not suitable for resolution by the court alone. The case proceeded to trial in December 2024. After O’Rourke rested, the parties had submitted eighty-seven stipulated undisputed facts. The trial justice granted Nationwide’s motion to discharge the jury, characterizing the regular use question as a legal one too “ambiguous to present to a jury of lay people,” and O’Rourke petitioned for certiorari.
The Court’s Holding
The Rhode Island Supreme Court, in an opinion by Chief Justice Suttell, quashed the Superior Court’s order and remanded for a new trial. The Court held that whether a non-owned vehicle was furnished for an insured’s “regular use” within the meaning of a UIM policy is a question of fact for the jury, not a question of law for the court. The Court reaffirmed its 1972 precedent in Ricci v. United States Fidelity and Guaranty Co., 110 R.I. 68 (1972), which expressly established this rule and provided five “signpost” factors to guide the factfinder’s analysis.
The Court found that the trial justice erred by treating the regular use determination as a legal question. Although the trial justice acknowledged a “mixture of law and fact,” he ultimately concluded it was too ambiguous for a jury—a rationale that directly conflicted with Ricci‘s holding. Because the Court has never departed from Ricci, the trial justice’s discharge of the jury before deliberations violated O’Rourke’s constitutional and statutory right to trial by jury on a factual issue. The Court declined to address the law-of-the-case argument in light of the remand order.
Key Takeaways
- Under Rhode Island law, whether a non-owned vehicle is furnished for an insured’s “regular use”—triggering a UIM policy exclusion—is a question of fact for the jury, not a legal determination for the court, even when the underlying facts are stipulated.
- The five Ricci signposts (availability of the car, frequency of use, need for permission, purpose of authorized use, and geographic scope) remain the controlling framework for the factfinder’s analysis in Rhode Island.
- A trial court may not discharge a jury and resolve a “regular use” exclusion dispute itself simply because the underlying facts are undisputed; the application of those facts to the policy language still presents a jury question.
- Stipulated facts do not automatically transform a fact question into a legal one suitable for judicial resolution without jury deliberation.
Why It Matters
This decision reinforces the boundaries between law and fact in insurance coverage disputes, particularly in the context of employer-furnished vehicles and UIM exclusions. Insurers in Rhode Island cannot avoid jury trial on “regular use” exclusions merely by pointing to stipulated facts; the mixed question of how those facts map onto the policy language belongs to the jury under Ricci‘s long-established framework.
For plaintiffs’ counsel, the ruling is a significant procedural protection: a trial justice cannot short-circuit the jury process by recharacterizing a fact-laden coverage dispute as purely a question of contract interpretation. For defense counsel and insurers, it signals that even seemingly clear-cut regular-use scenarios—an employee with his own keys, the same truck, every workday for three years—must be submitted to a jury in Rhode Island before coverage can be denied on that ground.