Appeals court bites down on dental malpractice: Fireman's Fund wins a round of legal wrangling after a court is not amused by a dentist's practical joke.

Placing prosthetic boar tusks into a sedated employee's mouth, taking photographs, and then showing the pictures to the employee once she regained consciousness are not acts covered by an oral surgeon's liability insurance, a state appeals court has ruled. The decision by the Washington State appeals court could set a precedent with regard to personal injuries incident to business, said Emilia Sweeney, a lawyer representing Fireman's Fund.

"The case does address at least one coverage clause not addressed by any other court in the United States, and that is the personal injury caused by an offense caused by a business," she said. "It provides some helpful guidance that heretofore was really only in insurance treatises." In the latest round of legal sparring, the appeals court sided with the insurer against dentist Robert Woo. The court found the dentist guilty of "devising a scheme to humiliate and denigrate" his patient, and that because of this, it wasn't the insurer's duty to defend its client.

Citing a precedent set in Standard Fire Ins. Co. v. Blakeslee in which a dentist groped a patient while she was anesthetized, the appeals court found that professional liability in the Woo case lay with the act of placing tusks in a patient's mouth, not in the fact that it occurred in a dentist office.