Insurance & Reinsurance Litigation

Greenberg Traurig helps its insurer and reinsurer clients resolve complex disputes arising out of all varieties of commercial, personal, surplus, and excess lines policies and reinsurance treaties. We represent clients in the full range of litigation, class actions, arbitration, and regulatory matters, including coverage disputes, claims relating to breach of contract, breach of fiduciary duty, bad faith, business torts, punitive damages, and state consumer-protection and unfair-competition statutes, as well as in bankruptcy, restructuring, runoff, and closeout. Our experience includes cases involving first and third-party coverages and claims (including direct actions and third-party bad faith), brought under property and casualty (builder’s risk, CGL, commercial and personal auto, homeowners, and property), life and disability, accident and health, management (D&O and E&O) and professional liability (medical and legal), media technology, cyber, employment (EPLI and ERISA), financial lines, surety, and financial guaranty policies.

As trial attorneys, our deep experience enables us not only to deliver strategic and cost-effective alternatives to litigation, but also to see matters through to trial or arbitration hearing and on appeal when needed. Our insurance and reinsurance team regularly tries cases and arbitrates disputes throughout the country in varied domestic and international forums. We employ innovative and cost-effective litigation management and dispute-resolution strategies, as the case and client dictate, to quickly obtain value for our clients. Our team focuses on swift, early, and objective case evaluations, strong summary judgment motions, settlement timing, and trial work.

The Insurance & Reinsurance Litigation team is complemented and enhanced by GT’s team of insurance consulting, regulatory, and business attorneys who have broad experience in the industry, representing insurers and reinsurers before their regulators and other governmental authorities. GT’s vast resources and platform allow us to manage not only the litigation and claims issues, but also the regulatory exposures and relationships that can be critical in managing our client’s needs, whatever they may be. Our resources and creative approach to efficient settlement and business-focused strategies have helped clients achieve their objectives in some of the largest insurance and reinsurance disputes in the United States. 

Our attorneys actively monitor recent industry developments, the insurance and reinsurance markets, and evolving law to assist clients in implementing institutional controls and claim-handling practices, in contract negotiations, and with other risk-spreading and preventative measures to help avoid known and unknown disputes before they arise.

Many of our team members are ranked in Chambers and Partners (2020) for their work on insurance matters, including in Band 1 for insurance and insurance regulation. Our team includes numerous litigators listed in The Best Lawyers in America (2020) in insurance law. BTI Consulting Group’s 2017 BTI Power Rankings list included GT on their Honor Roll for Insurance. In 2016, our team was identified as one of the “Strongest Firms for Go-To Outside Counsel—Insurance” in BTI Consulting Group’s BTI Report and as one of “The Top 16 Firms GCs Love for Insurance Work” in BTI’s Power Rankings.

Coverage and Bad Faith

Greenberg Traurig’s Insurance & Reinsurance team guides insurers, agents, and third-party administrators through the legal aspects of complex coverage, claims handling, and related disputes. Our team defends clients against all manner of contractual and extra-contractual claims, whether asserted individually or as a class action, including those involving institutional bad faith claims, national claim-handling programs, and computerized claim evaluation tools. With decades of experience, our team has litigated and arbitrated insurance disputes throughout the country.

In addition, GT offers coverage and claim-handling advice, coordinating-counsel services for the national defense of institutional claim-handling programs, and other counseling services to help insurers and administrators avoid litigation and minimize bad-faith exposure through the efficient and fair management of claim-handling operations. Our Insurance/Reinsurance team also regularly collaborates with GT’s talented insurance consulting, regulatory, and business attorneys, who have broad experience in the industry and in representing insurers and reinsurers in regulatory proceedings, to help offer the best strategies and value to our clients.

Class Actions

Greenberg Traurig’s Insurance & Reinsurance Litigation team is skilled in handling class actions and mass actions spanning the full spectrum of insurance products, claims for relief, and business practices, including class allegations involving computerized valuation tools, consumer protection statutes, institutional claim handling practices, life insurance and annuities, premium finance, securitization and derivatives, and RICO claims.

Reinsurance

Greenberg Traurig’s Insurance & Reinsurance team’s creative approach to arbitration and business-focused, cost-effective claim commutation and dispute-resolution strategies has helped clients achieve their objectives in some of the largest reinsurance coverage disputes in the United States. We help reinsurers and retrocessionaires strategically approach complex disputes involving issues such as actuarial modeling and other damage assessments, ratification, rescission, allocation, underwriting, the duty of utmost good faith, mergers and acquisitions, the purchase and sale of blocks of risk, and other controversies related to the retrocession of risk through reinsurance treaties and other risk-transfer arrangements. We offer clients a multifaceted approach to claims evaluation, arbitration, and, when appropriate, treaty commutations and settlements. Our attorneys can also assist clients with implementation of institutional controls, recommendation of reinsurance products, negotiation of treaty terms, and negotiation of treaty security.