My “Five Favorites for Friday” series is quickly becoming one of my favorite undertakings. It’s a terrific opportunity for me to go back over the stories and videos that have crossed my desk during the week, and think about what they mean for my practice, my clients and the readers of my blog. Hopefully, you find it is as useful an exercise as I do.

For those of you who may be new to the series, here is the original post introducing the series. Last week, I noted that I could have covered twice as many topics as the five that I did pick out, and the same is true this week. Nonetheless, I am going to restrain myself and limit it to five items. So here we go:

  1. I am a huge fan of ESOPs. I have seen more employees retire with real wealth, more companies improve their performance, and more founders cash out happily from the use of this tool than from any other business transaction that I have observed or been involved with over the past thirty years. Now granted, as a litigator, there is a certain selection bias in play – for instance, when I see a private equity roll up, it’s usually because the deals have fallen apart and litigation has sprung to life, not because the deal went great and a lot of people who would otherwise be employees ended up with an excellent exit. This article here, by two lawyers at Foley & Lardner, on the ESOP process and structure, is an excellent place to start if you want to understand exactly what an ESOP transaction looks like.
  2. In last week’s “Five Favorites for Friday,” I discussed why insurance is a wildly underrated career field for young professionals. In the same vein, today I am including these excellent short video clips from MS Amlin that explain why underwriting complex risks is similar to being a Hollywood stunt person. I know what you are thinking – I am sure it is similar to my initial response to the premise. But watch the clips and I suspect, like me, you will end up convinced that the comparison is apt.
  3. I love this article by two lawyers at Pillsbury on what insureds should know about triggering insurance coverage for long tail exposures. They draw on the lessons of the old school classics in this genre for their guidance, namely the asbestos and environmental coverage disputes of the 80s to the early part of the 21st century. (The authors note that “as of 2024, insurers had paid $121 billion in asbestos and environmental-related losses under policies they have issued to policyholders.”) My professional and personal experience tells me the authors are absolutely right both in the lessons they draw from that time period and their belief that those lessons resonate today. I was actually the paralegal who, back in the 1980s, spent weeks sitting in the Library of Congress finding old periodicals to be used in deposing underwriters on the question of what they thought asbestosis actually was when they were excluding it from policies, and in the early 1990s I was the junior associate on some of the key Massachusetts pollution exclusion cases. In fact, almost twenty years later, I was still litigating some of the same long tail issues when I tried a reinsurance dispute concerning long tail environmental losses involving occurrence policies from decades ago.
  4. Nothing going on in the news has changed my position and views on the use of alternative investments in 401(k) plans. See here, for instance. I am a lot more sanguine about lifetime income options being added to 401(k) plans, depending on how it is done, if only because I know from my own clients that some participants want them within plans and, further, they can actually solve for participants an actual problem they are concerned about, namely the risk of outliving their money. However, the devil is in the details on this one, and this essay by The CommonSense 401(k) Project on the use of annuities in plans is worth a read in this regard.
  5. I have written many, many posts on the central role that the insurance industry has to play in addressing climate change issues, having first written about work by Lloyd’s on this issue around a decade ago. The unbreakable relationship among the industry, losses from climate change and the necessity of functioning insurance markets in the operation of modern economies makes insurance carriers central to any economic incentive to target the problem. The same, it is increasingly obvious, is true for handling cyber risks to modern economies – as is pointed out by Zurich in this whitepaper addressing the extent of uninsured and uninsurable cyber risk, and the need for public and private coordination to address it. Hat tip, as we used to say in the early days of blogging, to Mark Flippen and broker Lion Specialty, for bringing it to my desktop.