This is neat. Here’s a nice little story right smack at the confluence of this blog’s topics, ERISA litigation and insurance coverage problems. The story describes a new insurance product being released by Travelers providing investment advisors and similar entities with expanded coverage for the risks associated with providing investment services; the policy will cover claims for things such as breaches of fiduciary duties owed to pension plan participants.
As discussed frequently on this blog and elsewhere, ERISA claims alleging the types of conduct that it appears this product is intended to encompass – claims often seeking many million of dollars -have become a regular part of the landscape in the past couple of years. It looks like this is exactly the kind of insurance product that these types of claims call for. Granted, I haven’t seen the policy itself. Still, the article points towards one of the more interesting things about the insurance industry, which is its capacity to adapt to changes in the litigation environment and to provide revised or even entirely new forms of coverage to account for those changes.