Insurance includes both contentious and non-contentious insurance and reinsurance matters. On the contentious side, this includes claims litigation, broker’s negligence and both “facultative” and “treaty” reinsurance disputes. There is also an element of professional negligence issues arising from insurance disputes. On the non-contentious side, this includes all forms of M&A, capital raisings, de-mutualization and other regulatory issues.

Many insurance lawyers spend as much as 15 hours a week writing letters to claimants, attorneys, commissioners, physicians, agents, senior management, and others. If an insurance professional is an unskilled writer, it will show up in every letter, report, proposal, Power Point presentation, manual, email, and memo.

Solving Drafting/ Editing Problems:

  1. A Formal Structure Is Not a Bad Thing – There is a pervasive myth that a formal structure for writing will “cramp your style.” Nothing could be further from the truth. From Bach to Bartok, some of the greatest musical composers have achieved sublime effects by using formal structures to ground and organize creative product. Every insurance coverage opinion ever written has followed the same basic structure: (1) factual background; (2) description of coverage; (3) coverage
    analysis; and (4) conclusions and recommendations for further handling. Far from creating a confining structure for coverage analysis, having a structured format for analyzing insurance coverage disputes helps you to organize your material and frees you to be creative and to work within this structure much as a classical composer may improvise within the familiar forms of a symphony or concerto.
  2. Don’t Jump to Conclusions – A lawyer often starts with preconceptions about whether a claim is covered. Some of this may come from your initial conversations and communications with your client. Bias may also arise from similar cases that you have handled in the past. As understandable as such preconceptions and bias may be, they are poisonous to an objective coverage analysis. A good coverage analyst must enter a project with an open mind and resist making judgments about
    coverage until the end of the opinion. Neither legal analysis nor your writing should be undertaken to support a pre- conceived conclusion. Your writing does not flow from pre-conceived conclusions about whether there is coverage. Rather, your final conclusions and recommendations flow naturally from the process of working through the facts and analyzing them in the context of the operative policy provisions and relevant jurisprudence.

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PERSPECTIVES FROM DIFFERENT COUNTRIES