You know, this is actually of more personal interest to me than it is probably of importance to insureds, insurers and their lawyers with regard to determining whether a duty to defend exists in a given case. That is because the rule reflected in the case I am about to tell you about is sensible
Coverage Counsel
Denial of Benefit Claims, The Repeat Player, and Saving Money on Litigation
By Stephen Rosenberg on
One of the first posts I wrote on this blog was about insurance coverage and the concept of the repeat player. The idea behind it was that insurers use the same counsel over and over again in coverage disputes, with the result that they put on the field – to use a sports metaphor &ndash…
The Attorney-Client Privilege in Insurance Litigation
My in-box, like most of you I assume, is inundated on a day in, day out basis with offers of webinars, seminars, and the like on every topic under the sun that the sponsors think I might even conceivably have any interest in or professional connection to. Most I ignore without even opening, as not…
Do I Need a Coverage Lawyer?
By Stephen Rosenberg on
Posted in Coverage Counsel
I have written, in various blog posts, highly detailed, rational and analytical explanations of why parties to an insurance coverage dispute should retain experienced coverage counsel to represent them; I have given long, detailed, argumentative explanations of the same point in a number of seminars. Often the analysis revolves around the fact that, if the…
Plain English and the Insurance Coverage Lawyer
By Stephen Rosenberg on
I have written before about why insurance companies use experts on insurance coverage, and why policyholders need to use them too. Indeed, there is little doubt in my mind that lawyers who aren’t specialists in the field often put their clients at a disadvantage when they engage insurance companies in disputes over insurance policies without…
Want to Learn More About the Tripartite Relationship?
By Stephen Rosenberg on
One of the widest read and linked to posts I have written recently was this one here providing the law of the so-called tripartite relationship in thumb nail fashion. Interest in this topic surprises me to a certain extent, because very much the point of the post was that, despite all the seminars and publications…
The Three Rules of the Tripartite Relationship
By Stephen Rosenberg on
We’ve been a little ERISA heavy here for awhile now, somewhat to the detriment of the insurance litigation half of the blog’s title, simply because of the range of interesting events that have taken place under the ERISA rubric lately. While all that was going on, though, a particularly good collection of articles on different…
Problems in Long Term Care Insurance and Lessons for the Rest of Us
By Stephen Rosenberg on
Posted in Coverage Counsel, Industry News
I criticized the New York Times a couple weeks back about an article on the NFL’s pension and disability plans, basically because the article was animated by an underlying ignorance of recent legal events concerning those plans. It may, perhaps, have been too much to expect that the reporter would have a full understanding of…
The Tripartite Relationship and the Attorney Client Privilege
By Stephen Rosenberg on
One of the more unwieldy of legal fictions is the so-called tripartite relationship among the insured, the insurer, and the defense counsel defending the insured against the claim. Duties run every which way in the relationship, and this beast is at its most cantankerous when one gets into the question of how the attorney client…
Attorney’s Fee Awards, and the Duty to Indemnify
I have written before about the American Rule – which requires parties to a lawsuit, in the absence of a fee shifting statute or contractual agreement, to pay their own legal fees – and the exception under Massachusetts law that runs in favor of insureds who prevail in coverage cases against their insurers. The Supreme…