Insurance/Risk Management
A successful business often finds a target painted on its back – a bull’s-eye for litigious competitors, plaintiffs or even employees. When a business is named as a defendant in a lawsuit, it looks to its insurance company for defense and protection. Unfortunately, that insurer may contest coverage for the claims made against its insured, with the complexity of claims and insurance products often makes this type of coverage litigation inevitable. Cokinos, Bosien & Young’s insurance/risk management practice group brings years of experience in complex insurance litigation to the table to interpret and enforce the terms of the policy in favor of coverage for the business insured.
At the same time, too many businesses discover that planning for the risk of claims or lawsuits often gets lost in the shuffle of watching the bottom line. At Cokinos, Bosien & Young, our lawyers bring these risks into focus for our business clients. We advise clients on whether a contemplated course of action can result in increased exposures and how those exposures can be minimized through risk management, spread through insurance or transferred by contract. By providing these front-end services, Cokinos, Bosien & Young furthers it goal of providing a full array of services to our insured business clients in order to maximize their protection against risks they encounter in doing business.
We perform a wide array of insurance and risk management related legal services for our clients:
- Coverage Litigation. We handle disputes over the duty to defend, indemnify, settle and appeal lawsuits and claims against our clients. Coverage disputes are often played out in declaratory judgment actions, appeals, arbitrations and mediations. Our lawyers are more than familiar with the peculiar dynamics of these avenues of resolution of coverage disputes, and in some cases, they have “made law” very favorable to the business insured.
- Other Parties Insurance. We analyze the claim to determine whether there are other sources of insurance coverage, indemnity or defense in addition to, or even instead of, our client’s own coverage.
- Defense Advice and Monitoring. Many policies fall for the reimbursement of the insured’s reasonable attorney’s fees incurred by the insured’s own attorney in defending the claim. Our lawyers assist in getting those fees paid. Even if the insurance company hires defense counsel to represent our client, we monitor the defense due to the conflicts inherent in the insured-insurer-defense counsel relation where the defense is provided pursuant to a reservation of rights by the insurance company.
- Risk Management Advice. Our lawyers review the client’s insurance program and coverages as to appropriate coverages for their peculiar exposures. The client’s business agreements are reviewed, revised or originally drafted to maximize contractual risk transfer.
- Liability Insurance. Our lawyers give advice and counseling on commercial general liability, directors and officers, professional liability, errors and omissions, pollution legal liability and virtually any other of the wide variety of insurance products which are purchased by sophisticated business insureds.
- Property Insurance. We counsel, advice and represent clients as to claims involving complex commercial property exposures involving builders risk, business interrogation, extra expense, commercial crime and subrogation issues.
- Fidelity and Surety. We represent sureties, principals and obligees in connection with performance, payment, bid, fidelity and the myriad of other types of bonds associated with sophisticated businesses.
- Kinds of Disputes. The claims we handle include the following types of claims:
- Construction defect
- Builders risk
- Work place injuries
- Design professional liability
- Commercial property and business interruption
- Business
