After disaster strikes or business operations encounter a potentially covered event, making sure insurance carriers live up to their legal responsibilities sometimes requires a fight. It’s not unusual for insurance companies to offer lowball settlement offers.
The Insurance Litigation team at Offit Kurman brings deep experience in all venues for dispute resolution, including various forms of alternative dispute resolution, such as settlement negotiations, mediation and arbitration. When a dispute cannot be resolved through one of these methods, we leverage significant courtroom experience to protect our clients’ interests in trial and appellate courts at both the state and federal levels.
In situations where you are sued, the insurance company is usually obligated to retain an attorney on your behalf. This attorney may have an ongoing relationship with the insurance company, which can be problematic for the insured. If that is the case, we work with you to closely monitor this complex relationship to safeguard that the attorney designated to defend you by your insurance company is acting to protect your interests and not prioritizing the interests of the insurance company.
We’ve represented policyholders, including closely held, publicly traded, nonprofit and municipal entities, with claims against their insurance companies and indemnification disputes. We’ve successfully litigated numerous issues related to the duty of insurance carriers to defend policyholders.
Class Action and Mass Torts Litigation
A significant aspect of most class action and mass tort cases is the insurance component. Whether a product has caused harm to customers, or a business is caught up in liability from toxic work environments, the defending business will likely be represented through counsel assigned by their insurance carriers. In these cases, we work alongside insurance counsel to ensure our client receives the best possible defense and not just a defense that caters to the insurance company that hired them. We have defended clients in multidistrict litigation (MDL) across the country and fought to ensure the insurance companies follow through on their obligations in litigation over water and mold, asbestos, Legionella and other forms of toxic exposure, as well as employment class actions and other business claims.
What We Do
Our Insurance Litigation lawyers have helped clients in a variety of insurance disputes related to indemnification, bad faith and duty-to-defend matters across a range of underlying coverage claims, including:
- Advertising injury and intellectual property
- Asbestos and other mass tort
- Business interruption losses
- Catastrophic collapses
- Commercial and residential real property
- Construction and construction defect
- Cyber risk and data theft
- Directors and officers (D&O) and fiduciary liability
- Employment liability
- Environmental
- Errors and omissions (E&O)
- General liability coverage (GLC)
- Hydrofracking
- Legionella
- Malpractice
- Personal injury
- Personal property
- Water and mold
Expert Witness Services
In addition to representing clients in insurance litigation, our highly respected professionals have also been called to serve as expert witnesses on insurance-related matters in states including Pennsylvania and Maryland.
