Policyholders’ Heaviest Hitters | Attorneys | New York

Clients rely on our adept, formidable advocacy team to maximize their insurance coverage, reduce their risk, and guide them safely through their liability disputes and bet-the-company challenges. With deep and varied experience and an outstanding, 20-year service-delivery history that includes more than $10 billion in insurance recoveries, we help policyholder organizations overcome legal and commercial obstacles while plotting the very best course forward.

Our award-winning team works closely with in-house counsel and c-suite executives, serving as advisors while simultaneously creating effective, aggressive litigation strategies. The two-pronged approach enables our clients to prevail in high-stakes conflicts, protect company interests, and profit from valuable insurance assets. Dedicated to responsiveness and fueled by a drive to understand all aspects of our clients’ businesses, we counsel organizations across a spectrum of industries, including manufacturing, software, financial services, healthcare, pharmaceuticals, energy, and education. Because we represent policyholders exclusively, we avoid conflicts of interest while procuring optimal outcomes for our clients at all stages of litigation, from summary judgments to trials and appeals.  When courtroom battles can be avoided, we help navigate clients through alternative dispute resolution processes.

Our lawyers cultivate and maintain close, long-term relationships with clients—including many Fortune 500 companies—embedding ourselves in the company culture and ensuring they get the best coverage.

Our Inventive Approach

Familiarity Breeds Originality: Two decades of cohesively practicing together enables us to operate at the highest level and craft unique and extremely effective arguments.

Uncharted Territory: Always forward-looking, we frequently advise clients that are grappling with disputes originating in emerging and quickly evolving areas. They include Covid-19-driven bankruptcies and other pandemic fallout, climate change impacts, autonomous driving accidents, alterations in the securities regulatory environment, and cybersecurity risks and attacks; we prevailed in a first-of-its-kind cybersecurity decision.

Alternative Fee Arrangements: Our creative thinking also informs our approach to payments, and we are open to adopting the remuneration and risk-sharing structures that work best for our clients.

Holistic Perspective: No matter the size or the type of organization we’re serving, we provide advice that takes into consideration both the short-term and long-term effects of insurance recovery litigation, business priorities and objectives, and public relations and publicity implications.

Our Strengths

  • Insurance recovery maximization
  • Exclusively policyholder representation
  • Trial ready
  • Alternative dispute resolution
  • Liability disputes
  • Insurance claim submission
  • Risk reduction
  • Risk transfer
  • Risk management

Experience Highlights

  • Our lawyers won a ruling for Verizon, enforcing the company's insurers to cover for tens of millions of dollars in legal fees and costs incurred in Verizon’s defense against a $14 billion lawsuit.

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  • Our lawyers obtained a judgment following a jury trial, securing tens of millions of dollars in coverage for TIAA, which judgment was affirmed by the Delaware Supreme Court.

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Relevant Experience

  • Lead counsel to Clover Health in securing coverage for defense costs in a case of first impression stemming from merger-related SPAC litigation.  Obtained ruling that Delaware’s “larger settlement rule” applies to defense costs.
  • Lead counsel to Conduent Inc., in securing rare reversal of jury verdict due to insurer’s counsel’s violation of evidentiary rulings, which confused the jury and resulted in a verdict that was manifestly unjust. In addition, the firm secured tens of millions of dollars in coverage for Conduent’s defense and settlement of a Medicaid investigation and related civil lawsuits by the Texas Attorney General.
  • Lead counsel to JRK, a real estate conglomerate, in obtaining a ruling that JRK experienced physical loss or damage caused by COVID-19 under its commercial general liability policy.
  • Warren Pumps LLC – Represented Warren Pumps LLC in a case seeking coverage from more than a dozen insurance companies for thousands of asbestos-related claims. Our lawyers have secured several high-profile courtroom victories for Warren, including:
    • A decisive jury verdict worth hundreds of millions of dollars
    • Landmark decisions from the New York Court of Appeals on the allocation of long-tail claims and the Delaware Supreme Court on critical issues, including assignment of policy rights and the trigger of coverage, which have allowed Warren to access more than $500 million dollars in asbestos insurance coverage limits.
  • New Jersey Transit – Secured a decisive victory in New Jersey appellate court allowing New Jersey Transit to access up to $400 million in insurance coverage from a group of excess insurance carriers to make much-needed repairs to its property following the devastating impact of Superstorm Sandy. The court rejected the insurers' attempts to enforce a $100 million "flood" sublimit in the policies finding that Superstorm Sandy met the policies' definitions of "named windstorm," for which there is no sublimit.
  • TIAA-CREF – Obtained a jury verdict worth $50 million that policyholder was entitled to recover 100% of its defense and indemnity costs. This came with a significant summary judgment decision for TIAA-CREF in Delaware Superior Court finding that a civil settlement of a lawsuit involving claims for disgorgement was an insurable loss under New York law.
  • Pella Corporation – Obtained a significant summary judgment ruling in Iowa federal court against numerous insurance companies holding that multiple class action lawsuits, which allege that certain Pella windows and doors were defective, and as a result, leaked and caused water damage were covered “occurrences,” under general liability policies and therefore insurable.
  • Givaudan Fragrances Corporation – Secured a major victory in the New Jersey Supreme Court with far reaching implications protecting a corporate insured’s right to reorganize its business as it sees fit, without fear of risking the forfeiture of its historic insurance coverage for environmental liabilities. On remand, Givaudan was able to successfully resolve the dispute with every insurer securing in excess of $500 million of limits.
  • AR Capital and its directors and officers – Secured a summary judgment ruling ordering that insurers must pay in excess of $70 million in limits incurred in defending and resolving securities matters.
  • Medidata Solutions Inc. – Obtained a Summary Judgment ruling from the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York allowing Medidata to access coverage under a Federal Insurance Co. commercial crime insurance policy for a loss that the company suffered as a result of a computer fraud incident. The decision is one of the first involving coverage for email “spoofing,” a threat increasingly faced by companies in all industries.
  • Conduent - Secured monies for investigative and defense costs relating to a $260 million Medicaid settlement.
  • WoodSpring Hotels LLC – Represented WoodSpring Hotels in its pursuit of coverage under a primary D&O policy for defense and indemnity amounts arising out of a lawsuit brought by a competitor alleging that WoodSpring and its former employee obtained and distributed the competitor’s confidential electronically stored information in order to lure customers away from a competitor. In May 2018, WoodSpring’s motion for summary judgment was granted requiring AIG to pay WoodSpring’s defense costs.

Recognition and Rankings

  • Litigation Department of the Year for Insurance - New York Law Journal, 2021
  • “Insurance Practice Group of the Year” – Law360 (2016 – 2020)
  • In 2020, Chambers USA again ranked our team in Band 1 for Insurance: Dispute Resolution: Policyholder in New York. Our group “handles the most complex and high-profile coverage cases and class actions” and is “well known for regularly securing key verdicts at trial and appellate levels for major corporate clients facing significant liability exposure. They have been at the top of the game for a long time and do a great job for clients.”
  • Our team was also ranked in 2018 - 2021 as a leading insurance litigation group (nationally and in New York) by Chambers USA.
  • 2020 The Legal 500 ranked our team as “leading lawyers” in Insurance: Advice to Policyholders:
    • Robin Cohen – Hall of Fame
    • Adam Ziffer – Recognized
    • Ken Frenchman – Recommended
    • Keith McKenna – Next Generation Partner
  • 2016-2021 The Legal 500 ranked our team as “top tier” for Insurance: advice to policyholders. The publication noted that the . . . insurance recovery practice has “experience across a wide range of insurance issues, including asbestos-related matters, as well as other product liability, environmental, toxic tort cases and D&O matters. The team also has significant regulatory expertise."
  • “Insurance Litigation Department of the Year” – The New York Law Journal (2017)
  • Our team ranked “Tier 1” nationally for insurance litigation by Benchmark Litigation in 2018 – 2021.
  • Numerous individual awards and rankings for Robin Cohen, Adam Ziffer, Ken Frenchman and Keith McKenna.

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