It’s interesting. I have been at DRI’s 2024 Insurance Coverage and Practice Symposium all day, and much of the discussion is either directly about or tangentially related to the impact of artificial intelligence on insurance. To me, the consistent theme that underlies all of the discussion is the ability of AI tools to improve the
Homeowners Insurance
Will Climate Change Bring With It an Insurance Apocalypse?
Many of you know that I have been writing about the intersection of the insurance industry and climate change for almost long as this blog has existed. I have long been interested in the economic relationship between the two, as the industry responds to climate losses and, in so doing, forces homeowners and other insureds…
Moral Hazard, Homeowners Insurance and Climate Change
The relationship between climate change and the insurance industry has been a favorite hobbyhorse of mine for over a decade, since I learned that Lloyd’s was closely studying the potential impact of climate change on insurance rates, profits, underwriting and the like. Good for the industry, I said then in my blog, for taking a…
Why Insurance Is a Climate Activist’s Best Friend
I began writing on climate change as a litigation and insurance issue back in 2007 and have been writing on the role of insurance as a potential and actual driver of climate change policy since at least 2010. Since then, it has become clear that the single greatest corporate driver of changes intended to…
The Interrelationship of the Two “M”s – Moral Hazard and Marx – in Florida’s Insurance Market
This is a great story from over the holidays that I wanted to pass along, which touches on many issues in the current insurance environment. It’s a story of how insurance industry insiders in the Florida homeowners coverage market have been able to get rich by “cherry picking” policies to underwrite, while leaving the riskiest…
Litigation, Insurance and Climate Change: Somehow, They All Seem Related Right Now
I started writing years ago on the litigation and insurance questions posed by climate change, focusing on two particular issues, namely: (1) the role of litigation in response to climate change issues; and (2) the response of insurers to increased risk exposure as a result of climate change. When I started writing on these topics…
The Canary in the Coal Mine Is Looking Sickly: Insurance, Climate Change and State Farm
Well now . . . The news that State Farm is going to stop writing new homeowners business in California didn’t surprise me at all, but it did ring a powerful bell. All the way back in 2007 I was writing that climate change would be taken seriously and action would be taken once the…
Sanders v. The Phoenix Insurance Company Is a Comprehensive Insurance Coverage Decision, But Have Bad Facts Again Made Bad Law?
So this is interesting, from a couple of perspectives. The First Circuit Court of Appeals has issued a fairly comprehensive opinion addressing a number of issues in insurance coverage law in Massachusetts. The facts are a little salacious, and read more like a John Grisham plot than real life, but unfortunately, odd facts often underlie…
A Reminder of Why Insurance Companies Matter
Its entirely politically incorrect in 2015, and rightfully so, to ever equate litigation (or football, or anything else) to war, but that doesn’t change the fact that there are historical lessons to be learned from military history and wonderful allusions and metaphors to be drawn from it. See, for instance, my early article on excessive…
Insurance Coverage, Tuberculosis, and that Guy on the Plane
You see, everything at the end of the day is about insurance. Risk sharing that allows smaller businesses to move forward with operations, plaintiffs’ decisions over who has enough insurance to warrant suing, even the economic dislocations of climate change – everything comes back to the insurance industry. Here’s a great example, and an amusing…