I am asked on occasion about the topics of this blog and their connection to my practice, more particularly how I ended up focusing the blog on its two primary subjects. For years, my litigation practice has focused primarily on three areas: intellectual property, ERISA and insurance coverage, in no particular order. A joke which
Industry News
A Break from LaRue: Anticipating Insurance Coverage Disputes Over Climate Change Exposures
Can’t do LaRue all the time, every post, although, frankly, the more one thinks about the Supreme Court’s three opinions, the more one can come up with to talk about. I will return to various issues raised by the opinion here and there, as time and interest allows. For now, though, I think I owe…
Niche Insurance and Government Investigations
I had two different, perhaps more substantive things in line to talk about today, but I think I am going to push them back to later in the week, to instead pass along a highly entertaining article (at least to people who really like the ins and outs and oddities of the insurance industry) that…
Is It Just Plain Rational for Insurers to Pull Back from Coastal Markets?
Anyone interested in the topics of this blog is probably familiar with the media coverage of homeowners insurers raising rates and/or simply withdrawing from writing homeowners insurance in coastal regions, including not just in the traditional hurricane regions of the south but up through New England as well. Many stories are replete with sturm und…
Dickie Scruggs
The media is ablaze with discussion of this whole Dickie Scruggs indictment/bribery circus. I don’t expect I am going to have much to say about it – ever -on this blog; not to put on airs, but although insurance is in the title of this blog, I try to focus the subject matter on substantive…
Robert Kingsley, Insurance Industry Oracle
In the first and so far last of our series of interviews with people of interest in the insurance and ERISA communities (I will do more at some point, but the interview post turns out to be the most difficult and time consuming to do well, which is probably why most people leave them to…
Is Global Warming A Horror Movie Waiting to Happen for the Insurance Industry?
My colleague, computer patent guru Robert Plotkin, once referred to insurance as a leading indicator when it comes to the issue of global warming, and I have talked before about the idea that governments and societies will act to curb global warming and to deal with related problems only when we reach the point…
Reinsurance and LaRue, All in the Same Post
Instead of posting twice in the same morning, I am going to try to address two distinct substantive issues, one involving reinsurance and the other ERISA, all in the same post, hopefully without turning this post into some sort of Frankenstein monster combination of topics that instead should have been kept entirely separate.
On the…
Should Credit Scoring Be Used to Set Auto Insurance Rates?
For those of you who don’t know, Massachusetts is in the process of dragging its insurance system out of some sort of strange, almost pre-Thatcherite British collectivist era, and into the modern American economic hurly-burly that marks pretty much every other part of consumer life. Today’s Boston Globe has an interesting little article on…
Why Health Care Inflation Numbers Justify ERISA Preemption of State Health Care Reform Legislation
Someone once said that Marx was wrong about a lot of things, but he was right that everything is economics. Nothing illustrates this maxim more than the various attempts by states to get around ERISA preemption – such as discussed here and here – and mandate health insurance coverage in one manner or another. These…