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Beyond helping companies maximize recovery when coverage is disputed, Pillsbury’s insurance lawyers provide wide-ranging advisory services to strengthen coverage and reduce the likelihood of coverage disputes.
Pillsbury’s Insurance Advisory Services team provides extraordinary value by helping companies avoid costly coverage disputes down the road. When a company renews its coverage, we put our experience handling disputed claims and our market knowledge to work, reviewing policies to identify gaps and potential weaknesses in wording, and drafting proposed changes to strengthen coverage.
In M&A deals, we ensure that policy benefits are properly transferred, help design runoff or tail coverage, assess pending claims, and evaluate whether potential claims have been properly reported and are adequately insured. Whether on behalf of buyers or sellers, we draft and negotiate the terms of representation and warranty and other transaction liability policies to minimize our clients’ deal risk. In environmental transactions, we negotiate fixed-price remediation contracts and pollution policies in a comprehensive risk transfer designed to address lender and other financial sponsor requirements.
Further, when clients’ insurers enter state-regulated insolvencies or London schemes of arrangement, we negotiate with state regulators and scheme administrators, guide our clients through the complex claims submission process to help maximize recoveries, and even litigate challenges to insolvency plans when necessary to protect policyholders’ interests.
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Insurance Policy Review
Utilizing our Insurance Policy Review Program, our team leverages its experience in handling disputed claims and extensive market knowledge to identify exposure risks and areas of potential improvement to policy wording. Then our lawyers draft proposed wording changes, as appropriate. Our work in this area most frequently involves D&O, cyber, property and construction programs.
Insurance Due Diligence
Our team has repeatedly demonstrated the value of proper due diligence and legal review regarding a target company’s insurance program. We focus on critical legal issues that the brokers do not address, such as ensuring that the benefits of insurance policies are properly transferred, designing runoff or tail coverage, structuring coverage to match transactional document terms, assessing pending claims, and evaluating whether potential claims have been properly reported and are adequately insured.
Transaction Liability Insurance
Fueled by the growth of representation & warranty insurance, the market for transactional risk insurance products grew more than 200 percent over the past four years, rivaling cyber insurance for the fastest growing insurance market. Whether on behalf of buyers or sellers, we draft and negotiate the terms of representation & warranty and other transaction liability policies to minimize our client’s deal risk.
Environmental Insurance and Risk Transfer
Pillsbury has decades of experience structuring and negotiating complex environmental risk-transfer arrangements, from the largest brownfield transactions to service station portfolio transactions. We have represented some of the largest wholesalers and owners of service stations in the U.S. in acquiring portfolios of service stations from Exxon-Mobil, Shell and other major oil companies. The team conducts environmental due diligence, and negotiates fixed-price remediation contracts and pollution policies in a comprehensive risk-transfer structure designed to address the requirements of lenders and other financial sponsors. When these arrangements require enforcement, Pillsbury helps clients pursue recovery.
Insurance Insolvency
Unlike other insolvent companies, which are subject to federal bankruptcy jurisdiction, U.S. insurance companies are uniquely subject to state court jurisdiction, a state-by-state statutory and case law scheme that is often not well developed. Policyholders frequently find themselves pitted against each other as they seek their share of limited funds and regulators become involved as well. Maximizing policyholder recoveries when an insurer is insolvent requires extensive experience and a deep knowledge of the statutory framework and state court process.
Adding another level of complexity, many insurance companies historically doing business in the London Insurance Market have entered into what are known as solvent or insolvent schemes of arrangement. These schemes are subject to a complex series of proceedings in the U.K. courts where the plans—and their effects on the rights of policyholders—are reviewed and approved. With knowledge developed over more than thirty years of handling claims against London Market insurers, we are uniquely qualified to negotiate with scheme administrators and guide our clients through the complex claims submission process to help maximize recoveries.
Our lawyers have taken active roles in most of the major insurance insolvencies and schemes of arrangement in the last two decades. In the U.S., these include Executive Life Insurance Company (California) and Executive Life New York, Mission, Reliance, Superior National, Home, Fremont Indemnity, and others. In the London Market, we have helped our clients recover from schemes of arrangement for Orion Insurance Company, London and Overseas Insurance Company, Minster Insurance Company, and others too numerous to list.
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Helped create a cutting-edge, proprietary cyber insurance program for one of the Big Four accounting firms.
Worked with broker to formulate top-of-market D&O policy to cover high-profile company after its Initial Public Offering.
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