Insurance Coverage
Roberts Tate specializes in providing insurer-side strategic counseling and litigation services to insurers on general liability; professional liability; property; and cyber, technology, and media insurance issues. Our attorneys provide innovative, creative, and practical solutions that recognize our client’s business objectives and relationships, relying upon our significant experience within the industry and the underlying exposures facing our client’s insureds, as well as effective and skilled negotiation at the mediation table and aggressive litigation and persuasive advocacy in trial and appellate courts nationwide. In short, Roberts Tate efficiently and thoroughly advises insurers – on both the coverage issues and underlying exposures – facing its client on a wide array of coverage matters that involve issues highly specialized or technical in nature.
More specifically, Roberts Tate has the capability to successfully litigate and resolve cases involving key insurance issues across the nation, including cyber/breach and E&O claims; environmental and chemical exposure claims; D&O claims, product liability, asbestos and other mass tort claims; personal and advertising injury; construction claims; and bad faith. Our work encompasses emerging issues such as pharmaceuticals/life sciences, cyber tort issues, privacy claims, and software implementation claims.
We handle major trial and appellate litigation nationwide involving all types of liability policies issued from large Fortune 500 corporations to smaller and privately held companies. In addition to its litigation capabilities, Roberts Tate excels in counseling insurers on coverage issues and working with defense counsel and insureds in order to minimize underlying exposures and limit the need for coverage litigation.
Roberts Tate is often called upon to assist in determining whether a duty to defend exists, whether an insurer must provide independent counsel, settlement of multiple claims with insufficient limits, and with particular experience advising on specific claims or a larger, portfolio-wide exposure. We also assist our clients with policy drafting and exposure evaluation.
Specific areas and issues that Roberts Tate frequently handles on behalf of its clients are allocation issues (involving insureds, third parties, or contribution issues with other insurers); successor liability issues; recoupment of defense and indemnity costs; other insurance issues, including interplay of cyber and crime/fidelity polices; additional insured issues; implication of exclusions, including pollution exclusions and business risk exclusions; products/completed operations coverage and related issues arising out of the application of aggregate limits and non-cumulation clauses; an insurer’s duty to settle; scope of “occurrence” issue and other policy conditions, including notice, cooperation, and voluntary payments.
Roberts Tate also has significant experience driving effective claims resolution for media and technology E&O claims, evaluating claims and the availability of coverage, monitoring covered claims and guiding them to successful resolution along with the insured and defense counsel, and resolving coverage disputes through litigation, mediation and negotiation as each specific claim may require. Claims often handled by Roberts Tate’s attorneys involve allegedly defective technology products or services or failed implementation, network outages made by third parties against insureds, theft or loss of trade secrets or other sensitive business information, media and advertising exposures (including allegedly improper website-related conduct), alleged wrongful advertising and marketing conduct (including deceptive and unfair trade practices, false advertising and unfair competition), and alleged state and federal statutory violations.
Roberts Tate is equipped to obtain swift declaratory judgments and litigate discovery-intensive coverage and bad faith lawsuits in all variety of insurance coverage cases. Overall, our attorneys are able to evaluate the merits and damages issues presented by a wide variety of underlying exposures and provide a deep knowledge of coverage issues and sensitivity to our clients’ business realities, including navigating among plaintiffs’ attorneys, defense counsel, insureds and other carriers to achieve value for our clients at mediation or through other informal dispute resolution, and when necessary, our experienced litigators achieve superior results in coverage and bad faith litigation at the trial and appellate levels.
