In today’s business landscape, insurance coverage is crucial to protecting the financial health of a business. An insurer’s decision to deny a claim can be disastrous to a company’s bottom line and it sometimes seems like an overwhelming task to get an insurance company to honor a claim. At Payne & Fears, we relish the challenge. We persuade, we push, and, when necessary, we litigate claims for our policyholder clients. Over decades litigating insurance coverage disputes, we’ve gained the institutional knowledge necessary to help policyholders win coverage disputes. We know how to unravel the mysteries of their policies, and we know which buttons to push to maximize our clients’ policy benefits.
Insurance Problems We Solve
The best counsel occurs before an insurance claim is made. Our insurance coverage advice is designed to avoid unnecessary insurance disputes. Key to this strategy is identifying the appropriate policies for our clients and helping them procure and renew policies that will cover their businesses. Where there is confusion, we are skilled in helping clients sort through the nuances of policy terms and identifying and eliminating coverage gaps.
By counseling clients on how to navigate the insurance claims process, we help maximize the likelihood of a successful and promptly paid claim. By instructing clients to tender their claims to insurance companies, we often head off disputes before they happen. Many insurers will find ways to delay or deny a claim based on small, seemingly insignificant procedural issues during the claims process, and we are experienced with anticipating and defeating such tactics.
When a claim dispute arises, we negotiate with insurers to resolve the claim without litigation when possible. In negotiating with insurers, we leverage knowledge gained over decades of experience to convince insurers to meet demands. That said, when negotiation fails, we are fully prepared to litigate and are tenacious in our efforts to assist our clients in litigating their insurance coverage claims.
Insurance Policies We Handle
Our insurance coverage attorneys have worked with virtually every kind of insurance policy, product, and platform existing today. We are particularly experienced with the details of commercial general liability policies, Directors and Officers (D&O) liability policies, professional liability policies, employment practices liability policies, builder’s risk policies, commercial property policies, owner-controlled insurance programs and risk-specific insurance products of various kinds. Whether policyholders need counsel on what kind of coverage they need for their business or an evaluation of the adequacy of their current coverage, our insurance coverage attorneys can help clients sort through the details of these policies.
Insurance Claims We Manage
Our experience covers a wide range of industries and exposures, and we are familiar with risks common to various industries. For developers, homebuilders, and contractors, we regularly deal with construction-related liability claims, including making sure claims for construction defects are promptly paid. For manufacturers, we negotiate claims for environmental liability claims. For various kinds of property and casualty claims, including service providers, we help obtain coverage for professional liability risks. After catastrophic events, we handle claims made for first-party property and business interruption losses. In the context of growing online business activity, we have experience handling claims for and policies covering cyber risks, which are becoming more common.
The Insurance Coverage & Litigation attorneys at Payne & Fears have built a solid reputation for counseling clients, resolving insurance coverage disputes, enforcing insurance coverage rights, and recovering insurance proceeds on behalf of policyholders throughout the nation. We represent policyholders in a broad spectrum of matters spanning from complex litigation against more than 50 insurance companies to simple disputes between one policyholder and one insurer.
Collectively, we have recovered more than $100 million on behalf of our policyholder clients. The insurance coverage attorneys at Payne & Fears are committed to staying abreast of new developments in this ever-changing area of the law and deploying creative arguments to maximize insurance benefits for our clients.