Expected or Intended

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I remember sitting in a continuing legal education class once, where the speaker was an experienced employment defense lawyer. He said that, normally, he liked to open his talks with a funny story or a joke, but he couldn’t do that during this particular talk, because there was absolutely nothing funny about sexual harassment; in…

There’s a famous (apocryphal?) story about Cato the Elder, one of the leaders of ancient Rome.  Cato was obsessed with destroying Carthage (now Tunis), the Roman Empire’s rival. He would end every speech (and apparently most conversations) with “Carthago delenda est” – Carthage must be destroyed.  The story goes that when Demosthenes (a prominent Greek…

The other day, I was talking with a lawyer who represented a plaintiff in litigation relating to a failed business transaction. He was lamenting the fact that, if he were to take judgment against the defendants, there wouldn’t be insurance to help satisfy the claim, since, according to him, “no insurance company is ever going…

I admit it, I admit it –  I’m addicted to the TV show “Bar Rescue.” (When my daughter was about 12 years old, and my wife was out shopping for the day, we once binge-watched about six hours straight, which probably could get me into trouble with the child welfare authorities.)   The idea…

Back in the days of the environmental insurance coverage wars, we on the policyholder side argued (eventually successfully in New Jersey) that the word “sudden”, as used in the 1973 version of the pollution exclusion, meant “unexpected” and did not have a temporal connotation. My friends in the defense bar often criticized us for trying…

We in business are all overwhelmed with reading material, but I try to make sure that I read at least some legal and business publications every day to keep up with developing trends.  And, it seems that every day I see another article about a new hacking incident, or another dire warning about cyber-risk.  (The…

I’ve sometimes commented on this blog that my first boss in the business warned me: “If you assume there’s no coverage, you won’t find any.” There are plenty of risk managers and brokers who believe that general liability insurance coverage exists primarily to protect against people falling down in the parking lot. Not suprisingly, many…

One of the celebrities we lost in 2013 was the novelist Tom Clancy. I wasn’t a Clancy devotee, but I have to admit that “Red Storm Rising” and “The Hunt for Red October” were excellent military thrillers. In “Red October,” the KGB officer on board the Russian submarine (Red October) thinks that, rather than surrendering…