Insurance

MBK represents insurance companies, reinsurers, intermediaries, brokers, agents, BGAs, and other businesses interacting with the insurance industry on the tough issues of the day.

Our attorneys have extensive experience representing life insurers, annuity companies, property/casualty insurers, and the brokers, agents, and entities involved in distribution and sales. Our vast insurance experience includes:

• Analysis and litigation of death benefits claims, with special skills in analyzing unusual claims, including claims involving possible suicide, foreign death, or fake death.
• Litigation services for BGA clients, with decades of experience and undefeated representation as litigation “general counsel” to a national life-side BGA.
• Secondary market in annuities, confronting and adapting to the challenges created by the factoring of structured settlement annuities.
• Viaticals – MBK attorneys have been in the forefront of challenging the abuses created by unlawful viatical transactions.
• Stranger-Originated Life Insurance (STOLI) – our attorneys were there at the beginning, helping craft solutions to this, the greatest litigation challenge to life insurance in the last twenty years. Our practice leaders literally helped write the book on how to curb STOLI.
• Receiverships and bankruptcies, including their impact on enforceability of life insurance policies within a receivership or bankruptcy and the entanglement of viaticals and STOLI.
• Lapse analysis and litigation, with deep familiarity with complex lapses, the institutional and systems realities, and the management of lapse litigation.
• Overseas sales and domestic sales to foreign nationals, including sales of U.S.-issued life insurance overseas, domestic sales of life insurance policies to foreign nationals, and claims arising under such policies.
• Annuity sales practices, with specific experience of putative class actions alleging abusive annuity sales practice.
• Other class actions, including class actions against life carriers, annuity carriers, and other life-side businesses, involving long-term disability policies, long term care policies, fixed annuities, and TCPA claims.
• Identity fraud, with decades of experience in identity fraud in connection with misuse of life insurance.
• Pension factoring – we understand the issues related to interests in periodic pension payments being factored in the same way as typified structured settlement factoring in its early days.
• Insurer liability for parts of a verdict or judgment in excess of policy limits.
• Insurer liability for bodily injury due to allegedly improper loss control inspections.
• Environmental coverage litigation, having successfully litigated environmental coverage issues with billions of dollars of exposure.
• Claims under excess and umbrella excess policies, with particular experience in the tactical evaluation of whether—and, if so, when—to contribute to a settlement of a claim being defended by a primary carrier.
• Business and non-policy related litigation, when our insurance clients have disputes unrelated to policies, they often turn to us to pursue or defend the matter.
• Prosecution and defense of claims involving brokers and agents.
• Insurance premium financing litigation.
• Insurance carrier rehabilitations and insolvencies, including their impact on pending litigation.

MBK’s insurance practitioners are renowned for their skill, dedication to client service, knowledge of the insurance industry, and their ability to deliver cutting edge results.Together, Steve Baker and Jack Dempsey have more than a half a century of experience representing stakeholders in the insurance industry.  Frank Brier, Neal Thatcher and Brian Levy bring deep experience in transactional risk assessment and questions of coverage with particular focus on healthcare, energy and environmental claims and litigation.  MBK insurance lawyers have been ahead of the pack nationally, identifying tomorrow’s tough issues, crafting strategies to combat them, and developing winning legal arguments and strategies that are now accepted as part of the catechism of insurance law. With proven success in matters of insurance litigation, clients even call on us for disputes unrelated to insurance, and  we have occasionally been called in by new clients as “the cavalry”; undertaking engagements, sometimes late in the proceedings, to manage a large case, or a case going in the wrong direction.

Our attorneys take an innovative, business-focused approach to insurance law. While other law firms talk about reducing fees, we focus on value creation. We maintain close client relationships and provide ongoing practical advice to not only minimize client exposure but maximize business opportunities. We offer non-traditional services such as facilitating and moderating in-depth meetings between the legal and business sides of an organization to discuss, and avoid, emerging claims and issues. Our attorneys even turned a potentially expensive lawsuit into an income source for one property/casualty insurer client who had spent a considerable sum assembling EPA records to defend a claim, and was able to monetize that research by later selling the assembled records to other insurer counsel.

MBK’s insurance practice gives back to the insurance industry. Our attorneys have spoken across the country to client and trade association audiences about emerging legal issues, claim exposures, and best practices. We have offered free training, including approved CLE or CE programs, to our clients, and have organized national symposia on important legal and claims issues. And we are always available to our clients to listen and strategize about the insurance issues facing their business.