Insurance Recovery and Counseling
Risk is a defining challenge for business today. Insurance, a long-established mechanism for transferring risk, often serves as the last defense against substantial, even ruinous, risk for companies and their directors. Accordingly, insurance is under increasing scrutiny by senior management and board members.
Our global insurance recovery and counseling team assists clients in managing and mitigating risk by maximizing insurance recoveries and optimizing insurance arrangements. Our team is familiar with the full spectrum of issues policyholders face, from the traditional (such as product liability claims and property losses) to the modern (such as cyber attacks). We provide integrated, creative solutions as our client’s economic activities grow globally and intersect with increasingly complex liability and regulatory regimes.
Representing policyholders effectively requires advocating positions adverse not only to insurers, but also to the insurance industry more generally. Many law firms are limited in their ability or willingness to represent policyholders because of their ongoing insurer client relationships. Our firm has no such limitation and our lawyers seek to challenge conventional wisdom as to what insurance contracts are “supposed to cover.”
Recovery
Our firm has recovered tens of billions of dollars on insurance claims for clients around the globe. Our approach for maximizing recoveries rests on three key propositions:
- We provide a policyholder advantage: Engaging our lawyers, who have experience drawn from thousands of policyholder engagements, levels the playing field for the policyholder against a well-funded and experienced insurer bar.
- We focus on holding insurers accountable: We reinforce the notion that policyholders have the ability to hold insurers accountable to a judge, jury, or other adjudicator to maximize insurance recoveries.
- We create efficiencies: Our lawyers are dedicated to delivering the highest quality services in as efficient a manner as possible. We develop targeted settlement approaches that leverage our policyholder advantage, deploy project management technologies in pursuing litigation, and embrace alternative fee arrangements.
Counseling
Some of our most value-added work comes before a claim or loss arises. Working with colleagues in other practices, our insurance recovery and counseling team helps mitigate risk by analyzing and negotiating insurance contracts and captive insurance arrangements. In analyzing insurance policies, we look not only at the specific contract terms but the larger context, knowing from firsthand experience how policy language actually is applied in coverage battles.
Transactions and Related Matters
We have substantial experience advising clients on the transferability of insurance coverage rights in the context of mergers, acquisitions, and other types of corporate transactions. We also routinely assist clients in transferring deal-related risk to insurers through the use of representation and warranty insurance and other insurance products offered in the transactional risk insurance market.
