Frankel

This is an appeal from a declaratory judgment rejecting an insurer’s assertion of noncoverage under the uninsured motorist portion of an automobile insurance policy.

The insurer sued its insured for a judicial declaration of noncoverage. The insured cross-complained against the insurer for bad faith, pleading the usual tort, contract, and statutory theories of recovery. This cross-complaint was severed, and its resolution deferred, while the insurer’s declaratory judgment claim was tried. Consequently the declaratory judgment from which the insurer appeals is a nonfinal judgment, and hence nonappealable. (E.g., Crocker-Anglo Nat. Bank v. Kuchman (1961) 194 Cal.App.2d 589 [ 15 Cal.Rptr. 230 ].) The severance of the complaint from the cross-complaint does not make the judgment on the complaint separately appealable, unlike the situation in Schonfeld v. City of Vallejo (1975) 50 Cal.App.3d 401 [ 123 Cal.Rptr. 669 ], because the complaint raises issues closely related to those posed by the yet-untried cross-complaint. Hence we lack jurisdiction to hear the appeal.

We will, however, treat the appeal as a petition for a writ of mandate (see, e.g., Olson v. Cory (1983) 35…