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Category Archives: Insurance
Insurance Industry reacts to ‘immoral’ claims farmers:
Ever since they first began appearing from murky corners of the industry back in the late nineties, ambulance chasers have never been particularly good at making friends. The thorny issue of claims farming has consistently remained on the lips of insurers and brokers alike ever since they first boomed from our TV sets advising us to sue everyone and anyone. Continue reading
Commercial Insurance Risks Explained
If you run a small or medium sized business you will need to understand the risks that your enterprise is exposed to in order to avoid financial loss. We asked our resident insurance expert to give us an overview of Commercial Insurance risks: Understanding Commercial Insurance Risks and Business Insurance Covers By Dave Healey If you own or manage a business, either large or small, you will require some type of insurance to protect your company against the various risks and potential multitude of claims, that your business will face Continue reading
WSJ editorial: With email revelations, it’s another wonderful day in the neighborHood
Another great editorial from the Wall Street Journal , which long ago saw that Dickie Scruggs and Jim Hood, despite claiming to be clothed with righteousness, were walking around with no pants. The backdrop of this opinion piece is the cache of emails that came from a document subpoena by State Farm in Ex rel. Rigsby , the False Claims Act lawsuit that was supposed to be the centerpiece of the Scruggsification of Katrina litigation, applying that special mix of Scruggs’ secret sauce: "whistleblowers, " folks making off with "insider" documents, add some sweet potatoes, stew it all up with mighty blasts of hot air and do a little home cookin’ in your friendly local magic jurisdiction. Before I talk about the WSJ piece and those emails a little more, I want to point something out about this Rigsby lawsuit. This is the one most people call the Qui Tam , but I don’t, because that sounds like some kind of toenail fungus, so I prefer to call it by its given name. The sand ran out in the timer on the Rigsbys’ 15 minutes of fame some time ago, and I feel sorry for them that they invested all their capital in shares of Scruggs, Inc. right before the doors got padlocked. Somehow they became convinced that wearing a gasoline suit and playing with matches was a great idea. It’s sad, really. What I want to point out is this — after the emails became public, and after I wrote about them here , I looked up the ruling by the federal judge in the District of Columbia that resulted in the Rendon Group being forced to give the emails to State Farm. About three years ago I wrote a chapter in the Appleman on Insurance Practice Guide (shameless plug) about the attorney-client and work product privileges and so I like to think my knowledge in this area of the law is somewhat above average. I was thinking, why weren’t these emails, or at least some of them, protected as work product or by the attorney-client privilege? Not saying they would have been, but I wasn’t clear as to why not. Now, before continuing, let’s take a pause and put a section here that is just for the people who aren’t die-hard, shrieking, soccer-hooligan-like fanatics of this saga. These folks, whom we will henceforth refer to as "normal people," might find useful an overview of this, just of whiff of Secret Sauce. If so, the judge in D.C. Continue reading
Insurance Brokers Pay for UK Banks PPI Claims
It’s that time of year again when UK Insurance Brokers and Intermediaries are asked to pay their annual membership fees for the soon to be defunct, Financial Services Authority (The FSA). Reading through the Insurance news this week you will find multiple stories from Brokers moaning about the ‘ridiculously’ high fees they are being asked for in order to trade. In some cases the fees have risen three fold on last years costs and many small operators are threatened with going out of business Continue reading
UK Public Demand Cheaper Young Drivers Car Insurance
Insurance blogger was searching the blogosphere when he came across this interesting story about the incredible number of uninsured drivers there are on the UK highways and byways, that quite frankly make you paranoid every time you get behind the wheel of your car: 300,000 Young Drivers without Insurance on UK roads by Performance Car Insurance on July 22nd, 2010 According to the Motor Insurers’ Bureau in a report released today, there has been a twenty percent drop in the number of people driving without car insurance in the UK. However, there are still a third of a million uninsured drivers on the roads in the UK without adequate car insurance cover. Continue reading
Corban v. USAA: A few (more) words about anti-concurrent causation
I’ve been meaning to write about this case for some time, and I even went down to Mississippi last October at the invitation of the University of Mississippi and spoke about the case at the Mississippi-Alabama Sea Grant Legal Program conference a couple days before Halloween. Mississippi is a great place, I love visiting there. I’d say it’s probably my next favorite place after North Dakota. Don’t get me wrong, Portland, Oregon is pretty nice otherwise I wouldn’t live here, but there’s a certain subtext of weirdness here consisting of getting all wee-wee’d up about needing to ban plastic grocery bags and create 600 miles of bike lanes at a cost of $1.5 billion. On my priority list, these things fall, oh I don’t know, somewhere in the bottom .00001 percentile. Maybe a little lower. So anyway, as I mentioned, great visit to Mississippi, and best of all, while I was there no one subpoenaed my "ass." Corban v. USAA was decided by the Mississippi Supreme Court in October Continue reading
The effect of the Budget upon the UK Insurance market
The hatchet man Chancellor George Osborne has spoken and the little red box opened to reveal one of the most stinging budgets in recent memory, already named the austerity budget, with huge public sector job losses, spending cuts and tax rises for all! On the face of it Insurance escapes fairly lightly with Insurance Premium Tax (IPT) raised for the first time in over ten years to 6% from 5%. IPT is chargeable on every insurance policy sold within the UK, although Insurance is currently VAT exempt. This rise will harden the market with slightly raised premiums, however it is suggested by many in the City that the percentage increase will mostly go un-noticed by the majority of the insurance buying public. A spokesperson for specialist car insurance company Car Insurance TV said that ‘this increase in IPT will add just a few pounds to the cost of an average car insurance policy, however levels of competition will often see this absorbed by the Insurance Companies trying to win your business’. A major impact upon the supply of Insurance and adding further inflationary pressures, will be the raise in the basic level of VAT from 17.5% to 20% Continue reading
The Cost of Insuring The FIFA World Cup
Every four years Insurance Companies underwrite all the risks associated with holding and attending the World’s largest sporting event – The FIFA World Cup Finals. Insurance Blog reports on the risks and covers available and the large premiums paid to ensure that this years Tournament currently going on in South Africa, went without a hitch… The prior concerns and fears that had been raised over the insurance cover for the 2010 World Cup failed to materialise as the tournament passed off without a major incident or claim. FIFA had been forced to build a R6.3 billion contingency fund (around a billion US dollars) to cater for the possible collapse of the 2010 event - a lot of money when you consider that the winners Spain only receive £40 million pounds ($60 million) in prize money. FIFA have taken out cover for any kind of interruption, delay or abandonment of the World Cup and the consequent loss of revenues Continue reading
UK Government CON DEM The FSA Insurance Regulator
The Coalition UK Government led by the right wing Conservative party, have fired their first major shot in the destruction of the Bureaucratic State with the announcement last night of the abolition of The Financial Services Authority, The FSA, which governs the regulated activities of all sectors of the UK Insurance Market. In a speech to those lovable Bankers and Merchants (Merchant Bankers having a Ruby to you and me Cockneys!) at the annual Lord Mayor of London’s dinner at the Mansion House last night, Champagne swaffing hatchet man George Osborne announced that the FSA will cease to exist in it’s current form by 2012. Continue reading
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Tagged bureaucratic state, coalition uk, corporal clegg, cuckoo cameron, david cameron, economy, fsa, George Osborne, government, Insurance, insurance brokers, insurance companies, insurance news, insurance regulation, insurance regulator, london, lord mayor of london, merchant bankers, night, Read, regulation, Ruby, UK, uk insurance market
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Insurance Marketing Old School
Insurance Blog was gazing through some very old travel guides when we noticed that Insurance Marketing has come a long way since the start of Insurance…. This old advertisement for The London Assurance Company from the turn of 19th century suggests that insurance was something that you didn’t talk about in public – like money! ‘Very good people to deal with” What’s all that about then Continue reading