Specialty Insurance Blog
Insurance agents may wonder whether an insured has a duty to notify an insurer of material changes in exposure other than through the normal application process. According to a recent appeals court decision (see here here) an insured does not. . The case involved a commercial auto policy which was renewed for 9 years with no renewal application requested or provided. During this time the insured owner stopped conducting his business through the company and conducted the business personally. He...
The success or failure of the regulatory approaches utilized in Florida and Louisiana to ease the insurance crisis is critically important to the insurance industry, particularly insurance agents who bear the brunt of communicating the resulting market conditions to clients. We have followed the varying situations in each of these key states with interest, and have noted that each state has taken quite a different path. Last week we noted the shift of hurricane exposure to quasi-governmental entities (see here),...
Earlier this week we noted that insurance agents will be watching closely as the hurricane gets underway (see here). A WSJ article (6/7/07, see here, $$) discusses the shift in hurricane risk from private insurers to government sponsored insurers: Insurers of last resort, generally quasi-governmental insurers, are filling the void left by the private insurers exiting hurricane prone regions. The result is much of the hurricane risk is being indirectly assumed by the general public These insurers of last resort...
Insurance agents provide Directors Officers (DO) liability insurance to both for-profit (public and private) companies and non-profit organizations, and in many cases do not consider the possibility of bankruptcy. The primary purpose for buying DO insurance is to protect the personal assets of the Directors and Officers, especially when the organization is not in a position to indemnify the Directors and Officers. Bankruptcy creates additional and complex duties for Directors at a time when the organizational indemnifications are worthless (presumably,...
