If you were born and raised in New Jersey like me, you’ve heard your share of New Jersey jokes from interlopers who think the entire state looks like the Turnpike near Newark Airport. (“What exit?” How wonderfully clever.) My response to these jokes is two-fold. First, trust me on this, we don’t like you, either.
Directors & Officers Liability
D&O Insurance and the “Capacity” Exclusion
By Gene Killian on
Posted in Directors & Officers Liability
Back in the 80s and 90s, during the environmental insurance coverage wars, each side (insurance companies and policyholders) frequently accused the other of trying to insert imaginary language into insurance policies after losses had happened. Many lawyers put their kids through college arguing about the meaning of the words “sudden” and “accidental,” for example, in…
Insurance coverage (or maybe not) for computer fraud
By Gene Killian on
In the world of insurance, computers are the new “environmental.”
Let me explain. Back in the 1980s, the insurance industry, recognizing the magnitude of exposure it faced for environmental liabilities, embarked on a public relations campaign to convince courts and policyholders that no coverage existed for environmental problems under comprehensive general liability insurance policies. (The…
Employment practices liability insurance and wage-and-hour claims
By Gene Killian on
When we started our law firm 22 years ago, a colleague gave me some very sage advice (which I guess came from bad experience): Get your accounting straight from day one, and keep it straight. To this day, whenever a fellow professional asks me about going out on his or her own, I give the…
The Shortcomings of D&O Insurance
By Gene Killian on
Here’s how a major insurance company (Travelers) describes D&O insurance: “Directors & Officers (D&O) Liability insurance helps cover defense costs and damages (awards and settlements) arising out of wrongful act allegations and lawsuits brought against an organization’s board of directors and/or officers. These types of claims have become increasingly common and directors and officers…
Beware the Strict Interpretation of Notice Provisions in Claims-Made Policies
A few years back, a major financial institution retained us to review its insurance coverage program. After checking the main items I usually look for, I asked the Risk Manager whether the heads of the organization’s various business units knew the basics of the notice provisions in the company’s major coverages. I could see her…
Fidelity Bonds and Employee Fraud
By Gene Killian on
It’s amazing to me that Nigerian banker scams continue to appear in my inbox every now and then. After all these years, businesspeople apparently continue to fall for them. Click here for a pretty good fact sheet from the Australian government on how these scams work, and how to avoid them.
Recently, a Minnesota bank…
Claims-Made Coverage and “Related Wrongful Acts”
Claims-made policies were supposed to simplify things. In an article a few years back, insurance expert Fred Fisher noted that the idea behind such policies was to provide greater actuarial certainty for insurance companies, by ensuring that there would be no more claim activity following the end of a policy period (eliminating the “incurred…
The Penn State scandal and the duty to defend
I greatly respect judges. And, I feel sympathy for judges. They have a very difficult job. We hand them enormous caseloads for relatively low pay (most of them could make a lot more money in private practice) and then expect them to become conversant in every legal subject imaginable, from water rights to alimony. By…
Other insurance clauses and the duty to defend
By Gene Killian on
New York’s highest court just handed down an interesting decision in Fieldston Property Owners Ass’n v. Hermitage Ins. Co. The case involved an underlying suit for “injurious falsehood,” and the question of who was obligated to provide a defense – the CGL carrier, the D&O carrier, or both? The CGL policy stated that its coverage was…