Professional Liability

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When I was a kid in Maplewood, New Jersey, our next-door neighbor was a feisty Irish widow named Anne Byrne.  (She was related to our former Governor, Brendan Byrne, but I forget how.)  When I would do something stupid, which usually involved putting some kind of ball through one of her windows, she would grab…

When my daughter was little, we loved putting jigsaw puzzles together. We would dump the pieces on the floor and spend hours trying to figure out how they fit. Sometimes there would be a “gap” in the puzzle, and we’d eventually get frustrated and assume that we were missing a piece. But somehow, the missing…

Since the economy tanked, we’ve seen a number of cases in our office (particularly in the area of construction defects) where a defendant (such as a subcontractor) has become insolvent, and we’ve been called upon to pursue a direct action against that defendant’s insurance company.  Surprisingly, insurance companies don’t really care for this. So, the…

“For want of a shoe, the horse was lost,” goes the old saying.  If you handle claims from the policyholder side, nothing will aggravate you more than seeing a perfectly good claim go awry because of poor risk management controls in an organization, especially the failure to give notice under potentially applicable insurance policies.

The…

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…

At the end of this month (January 26, to be exact), assuming that the Mayans remain incorrect, I’ll be doing a presentation to the New Jersey Institute for Continuing Legal Education on the topic of insurance coverage for cyberthreats.  Of course, I probably should be disqualified from making any comments whatsoever about trends in computer-related…

New York’s highest court issued an interesting decision last week on the professional duties of insurance brokers.  This is a topic of renewed interest following Sandy, as I’m sure that more than a few policyholders will claim that their brokers provided them with insufficient coverage to weather the storm (pun intended).  I know, for example…

I’m reading a wonderful book right now called “Young Men and Fire,” by Norman Maclean.  The book is about a horrific forest fire that took place in Montana in 1949.  Amazing how small sparks can result in a conflagration beyond all belief.   Those of us involved in the litigation game are familiar with that problem. …

The answer is maybe, under some circumstances.  Unfortunately for the major accounting firm BDO Seidman, however, such circumstances didn’t exist in a recent New York coverage decision.  You can read the full opinion by clicking here.

BDO’s coverage dispute stemmed from a $92 million Florida jury verdict against BDO (ouch), which included $55 million…

In Continental Casualty Co. v. Law Offices of Melbourne Mills, Jr., PLLC, the Sixth Circuit has just ruled that a lawyer’s failure to disclose an ongoing state bar association investigation against him constituted a material representation justifying the rescission of his malpractice insurance.

The defendant was one of three attorneys who represented a class of Kentucky…