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.
K&L Gates’ global Insurance Recovery and Counseling team assists policyholders 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/business interruption losses) to the modern (such as cyber attacks and data liability). We provide integrated, creative solutions, as our client’s economic activities grow globally and intersect with increasingly complex liability and regulatory regimes.
Our lawyers are committed to enhancing and enforcing the rights of policyholders, free from the conflicts of interest faced by many law firms because of their ongoing representation of insurers. Our firm faces no such limitation and our lawyers implement insurance strategies which seek to optimize policyholder’s interests, whether advising on coverage terms at the policy renewal stage, assisting with incident response and claims submission, or representing policyholders across the globe in mediation, litigation or arbitration.
Recovery
Our firm has recovered tens of billions of dollars in the US alone, and additional recoveries around the world, on insurance claims for policyholder clients. 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 an experienced and well-funded insurance bar and industry.
- We focus on holding insurers accountable: We reinforce the notion that policyholders have the right to be treated fairly and insist that insurers honor their contractual commitments, and we hold insurers accountable to a judge, jury, or other adjudicator if they do not.
- We create efficiencies: Our lawyers are dedicated to delivering the highest quality services in an efficient and cost effective manner. We develop targeted settlement tactics 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. Our lawyers, often working with colleagues in other practices, help mitigate risk by analyzing and enhancing insurance contract terms and advising on captive insurance arrangements. In assessing insurance policies, we look not only at the specific contract terms, but the larger context, knowing from first-hand 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.
