I have always loved puzzles. Jigsaw, crossword, and Wordle. (But not Sudoku. I am a lawyer, and we don’t do math.) Give me the New York Times games app, and I can entertain myself for hours. It should therefore come as no surprise that I ended up as an insurance coverage lawyer. Or coverage nerd. Potato/Potatoe.
I may be a coverage lawyer now, but I did not set out to be in insurance. In fact, when I started as a baby associate with an insurance defense firm right out of law school, I knew nothing about insurance or coverage law. Literally nothing. I had never even managed the insurance for my own car, much less read an actual policy.
I learned a little bit from handling litigation files, but it wasn’t until my boss handed me my first coverage analysis and opinion to work through that I actually started to get it. The facts of the loss didn’t fit into the neat policy box, and the insurer needed help figuring out what to do. I didn’t much like answering discovery or taking depositions, but I really liked figuring out how weird facts fit into the system of rules imposed by a policy.
Coverage is a puzzle. A beautiful, frustrating, murky puzzle that forces you to piece together the interests of the insured, the terms of the policy, the jurisdiction, the story the insured tells, and the story everyone else tells. Sometimes, even with all of those competing interests, there is a clear and easy answer. Often, however, there is not a clear answer, and the puzzle does not have a clear solution. My team, Claims Legal, exists to help the company figure out the best solution to the puzzle when the answer might otherwise have been about as clear as what you might get from a Magic 8 Ball.
“Coverage is a puzzle. A beautiful, frustrating, murky puzzle that forces you to piece together competing interests to find the best solution.”
In private practice, lawyers are often limited to one area of law in one jurisdiction. In contrast, because Skyward Specialty writes an incredible variety of coverage all over the country, Claims Legal gets to see endless permutations of issues and places. In a single day, I may work closely with outside counsel in New Mexico to figure out the best strategy for a coverage action, evaluate whether a claimant in a trucking accident in California qualifies as an employee of the insured under California law, try to figure out whether our Absolute Worker exclusion applies to limit coverage in a New York labor law claim, evaluate whether bad faith allegations in a general liability claim in Georgia have any merit, and then try to figure out whether Oklahoma or Texas law applies to a contract for the purpose of evaluating possible contractual indemnity obligations for a Texas oilfield claim (I still don’t know, but I’ll get there).
Every day, Claims Legal sees the practical, real-life application of the decisions made by every other part of the company. For example, what if we issue a general liability policy for a concrete contracting company with an endorsement excluding coverage for any operations connected with pig farms? That may seem oddly specific, but there may have been a very logical reason to be worried about pig farms, based on the risk presented by a particular insured (maybe they have a bacon side-hustle?). Now imagine that the insured is hired to pour the cement foundation for a new cow barn on a farm that also has pigs. The contractor fails to secure the area with wet concrete. Wilbur the prize pig wanders in, gets stuck, and is injured. Pigs are pretty smart, but still, stuff happens.
“There’s almost always more than one technically correct answer. The Challenge for Claims Legal is figuring out which possibility makes the most sense.”
So is that an operation connected with a pig farm? Or is the fact that the claim happened to occur at a farm with pigs just a coincidence? To figure out the answer, we have to consider many pieces of the puzzle. Where did the accident happen? Where was the policy issued? Why did the policy have that endorsement in the first place? Is the endorsement clear enough to have conveyed our intent to the insured? What does the complaint say? Are we allowed to consider facts outside the complaint? And then once you have the answers to all of those questions (and sometimes 5-108 other questions), we read them like tarot cards to try to figure out the best answer. Notice I did not say the right answer. There is almost always more than one technically correct answer. The challenge for Claims Legal is figuring out which possibility makes the most sense, protects the interests of the insured, and mitigates risk to the company.
Sadly, not as clear-cut as the Wordle, but often far more interesting. After all, we don’t get six guesses to get it right.
My name is Kate Slade, and I’m in insurance.
