Directors’ & Officers’ Liability

With increasing frequency, professionals and the business they govern are accused of misconduct by investors, business partners, customers and many others. We routinely provide assistance in several different areas regarding D&O exposures:

Coverage Analysis: Our lawyers have provided hundreds of coverage opinions on a wide variety of coverage issues raised by professional liability claims. Our lawyers have extensive experience in the scope of the insuring agreement under standard D&O policies, the common exclusions implicated by business tort claims, standard endorsements to most D&O policies, and problems raised by inaccurate statements made in the D&O application.

Monitoring Counsel: The firm has been repeatedly retained by insurers to assist them in their defense of securities fraud, intellectual property, and business tort claims implicating D&O coverage. Because our lawyers are first and foremost trial lawyers, we know how to evaluate cases and we know how to try them. As a result, our clients frequently rely upon our expertise in order to help them monitor defense counsel in order to give our insurer clients greater insight into the liability and damage exposures, greater leverage in the settlement negotiations in the underlying claim, and critical feedback to defense counsel to maximize the chance of winning an underlying business tort case.

Industry Counsel: The firm’s lawyers regularly advise our clients on minimizing future exposures in D&O claims. The firm’s lawyers have assisted some of our clients in drafting D&O policy forms and endorsements. Our lawyers also provide training to some of our clients in the latest techniques and strategies of handling cutting-edge issues arising under D&O policies in order to minimize claim mistakes and reduce litigation exposures. In the past, we provided counseling to our clients on many cutting edge issues including Y2K exposures, e-commerce claims, and tort exposures arising out of Sarbanes-Oxley compliance.