Insurance

Our lawyers can help your business more fully utilize insurance as an important tool to offer protection against commercially significant risks and allocate or shift risk appropriately among parties to business arrangements.  We can assist you in obtaining full benefit of premium dollars that you invest, understanding what coverage is available to fit the particular needs of your business, making sure that it covers the most significant risks for current and future operations and partnering with your insurers so that your business gets all the coverage that it expected and its insurance contracts provide.

Many business owners and even their business lawyers find these tasks to be a challenge, because insurance policies seem to be written in a foreign language.  Brenner, Saltzman & Wallman has lawyers who speak and understand that language.  They can also clarify and explain the limitations of currently available coverage, so that you can consider the need to change business practices to avoid or limit uncovered risks or prepare financially to deal with those risks for which affordable insurance may not be available.

Services

We can assist you with--

• Understanding communications from and preparing effective responses to insurers who challenge your right to coverage for claims and losses
• Understanding your rights and responsibilities under insurance policies when you need to call upon them, so that you partner effectively with your insurer to get full benefit of your premium dollars
• Appropriately reporting and managing claims to protect your risk profile, so that when securing future insurance the premiums charged reflect actual experience
• Making sure that the coverage provided under the policies that you bought matches the coverage that you thought you were paying for
• Evaluating whether you can shift premium expenses to other parties to your business dealings and helping you configure your business relationships to do so
• Analyzing whether changes in your business structure will affect your coverage and how to adjust your insurance profile to meet the new structure
• Planning major transactions to maximize your ability to access existing insurance coverage to protect you from financial exposure for the past, present and future operations of another party or arrange funding for the purchase of new insurance you may need to address those risks

Representative Matters

• Assisted a lender with analyzing historical coverage available to a potential borrower which faced over 100 high profile lawsuits arising from the acts of a former employee to evaluate the risk that potential verdicts could impair the borrower’s ability to meet its obligations under the financing agreement
• Refocused a client’s claim from a crime policy to errors and omissions coverage, when investigation of underlying facts, compared with policy language, revealed that the crime policy would not cover losses to a third-party injured by the client’s employee’s acts
• Identified a gap between existing coverage for an American company and the program of insurance held by the foreign entity which sought to purchase it and negotiated the purchase of insurance by the foreign buyer to protect the principals of the American company through the transition following the acquisition
• Negotiated with an insurer to obtain reimbursement of attorneys’ fees for both corporate and local counsel in foreign litigation relating to intellectual property and claims against directors and officers

• Simultaneously resolved a suit with the purchaser of a client’s business, a coverage dispute with the client’s environmental insurer, and cleanup orders issued by the State of Connecticut, by creating a new corporation to receive insurance proceeds dedicated to remediation of contamination at the business

• Negotiated a new structure for exclusions in an environmental insurance policy specific to needs of both seller and buyer of contaminated property, including protection for potential third-party liability, while addressing insurer concern about existing Transfer Act obligations
• Re-drafted insurance and indemnity provisions in renewal of long term lease to limit obligations to providing coverage and indemnity for tenant client’s own operations, rather than all activities on site