News & Resources

During presidential campaign years, early primary states like Florida can benefit as candidates and their entourages make their ways from corner store to neighborhood restaurant, wooing voters at every turn. Business owners should check their general liability insurance, though, because a candidate visit can be a mixed blessing. In our last post, we were talking about some of the problems businesses have to deal with during campaigns, including having a large group of people in a small café or boutique.

The Florida primary is coming up, and the state is gearing up for the campaign stops and the stump speeches. This summer, Florida will host the Republican National Convention. The state’s hospitality industry is looking forward to the economic boom that comes with all this political activity, but individual business owners may want to think about the risks that come with large crowds. Now is the time to review property and commercial general liability insurance coverage.

As Florida’s insurance industry and lawmakers gear up for the coming legislative session, a trade association for risk managers is asking for more sweeping reform. The Risk and Insurance Management Society, Inc. wants the federal government to promulgate uniform, national regulations for commercial insurance.

There’s a silly ad on television right now, for a smart phone. The phone is reading messages to Santa (Mrs. Claus writes to stay away from the cookies, for example), ending with a summary of Santa’s schedule. “You have 3.7 billion appointments today,” the electronic voice croons.

Every year, an untold number of Florida’s families wonders what would happen if a big storm rolled in on Christmas Eve and Santa couldn’t make it. Rudolph can only get so far with the shiny nose thing. In hail and sleet and even a major wind storm, Santa could be grounded — or worse, he could be in an accident along the flyway or on the slippery roof of someone’s house.

We are continuing our discussion of a study scheduled to be published in January. The researcher, a law school professor, looked at policies from the top 10 insurance groups in six states. (Florida was not one of them.) What he found was that some of the big insurance companies use policy language that is “systematically less generous” than the language used in the once-standard Insurance Services Office policy.

Most Florida homeowners are probably more familiar than they want to be with shopping for insurance. Indeed, in this state, a homeowner may just be grateful that he has a choice. It’s a safe bet that the choice comes down to price, too — premium and deductible, especially in a tight market, tend to outweigh the fine print of the insurance policy. It’s just the standard stuff you find in homeowner policies, right?

We have been talking about business insurance. The passage of the Dodd-Frank Act in 2010 changed the landscape for businesses — especially financial services companies — by instituting a de facto incentive for whistleblowers. The heightened risk of an investigation, initiated by an internal complaint or a regulatory inquiry, should prompt business to review their insurance policies. The directors and officers coverage of the old days may not be enough.

We are continuing our discussion of the impact of the Dodd-Frank Act on business insurance. The law includes protections and incentives for whistleblowers that may very well result in internal and regulatory investigations. Even if there is no wrongdoing, the costs of these investigations will likely be steep. Companies, then, will want to review their insurance policies, particularly their directors and officers coverage.

In the wake of the financial meltdown, mortgage servicing companies and lenders, banks and brokerage houses, any business that had anything to do with the securitization debacle suddenly became the object of intense regulatory scrutiny. Every investigation poses a risk to the company and its directors and officers. Enron is just one example.