Services include experience as both an attorney and as a corporate manager in routine as well as complex issues related to information needed by clients to make corporate business decisions in matters associated with government regulation, counterparty issues, planning for tax, succession and sale options.

Experience in all fifty States, with active practice for over thirty years in each State insurance department, and physical meetings on-site with regulators in nearly two-thirds of the States in the U.S. In-house private practice experience in life and health as well as property and casualty products, sales, underwriting compliance, insurance advertising, policy and certificate matters, and other insurance practice areas.

Reinsurance agreement drafting experience in a wide variety of law matters for both assuming and ceding companies, and specialized experience with companies that serve as major reinsurers only, with limited direct business.

Client matters have been supported through many on-site administrative hearings at respective State insurance departments, as well as through responsibilities in government relations matters in the development of proposed laws and insurance regulations, and in testimony and work with legislative committees. Prior experience includes responsibilities as the senior officer in charge of government relations for insurers such as CIGNA's group insurance operations, and in private practice for some of the nation's largest insurers and reinsurers. Administrative law practice additionally has included matters in which insurers or producers were required to respond to proposed fines or sanctions brought by insurance regulators based on a variety of practice issues.

The licensing of an insurance company can be a complex and lengthy process. Our well-seasoned experience includes hundreds of individual insurance licenses obtained for insurance companies -- both life & health and property & casualty licenses, including many specialty licenses. We maintain detailed industry records which permit the development of comprehensive insurance company corporate business plans of operation that include historical information as well as summaries of underwriting, actuarial, claim, investment, sales, reinsurance, management and many other areas of insurance company operations of focused interest to insurance licensing authorities. Our experience includes the prosecution of new licenses, license renewals, requalifications, surrenders and transfers. Each engagement is tailored to a client's objectives for time, cost, geographic area, sales and product needs.
 
In certain cases in which an insurer is unable to locate its original licenses in States in which such licenses are issued on a perpetual rather than on a yearly renewable basis, we've actively assisted insurers to bring their operations and the underlying authority on which they rely into full compliance.

Mergers, acquisitions and the decision to enter or to leave certain geographic or product areas can give rise to requirements to obtain prior approvals from an insurer's State of domicile, as well as from other affected jurisdictions. Some States assert that insurance licenses cannot be sold in their jurisdictions, but will describe that the requalification of an existing license may be less time-consuming than an application for a new license. There are many considerations that need to be incorporated into a business plan whenever the purchase or sale of an insurance company or of a block of business is involved. We specialize in developing comprehensive plans early in any of these matters so that a roadmap can be put in place through which to manage time, costs and respective projects tasks.
 
Similarly, the change of an insurer's name, or of its State of domicile, can involve extensive and time-constrained procedures associated with notifications to domestic as well as foreign States in which an insurer operates within the United States. The failure to make timely filings can result in fines or sanctions. The comprehensive plans that we put in place are found by clients to be especially useful in managing these types of transactions.

The insolvency of an insurer can involve administrative law procedures in multiple States, as well as litigation simultaneously in State and Federal Courts. Considerations associated with State insurance guaranty associations, with reinsurers, and with other insurers that have counterparty interests all need to be addressed as early in each instance as possible. In addition, a respective State insurance commissioner often is designated as an insurer's agent for service of process when a license initially is granted to a company, typically many decades prior in time, and understanding the implications of such standing is critical in managing ensuing litigation related to insurer insolvencies.
 
Our insolvency experience encompasses numerous years in many States. This experience is focused and specialized to the extent that we're often asked to work as co-counsel with other law firms that become involved in such matters. We enjoy bringing this type of specialized experience to any engagement, and in whatever capacity a client would like us to serve.

Holding attorney registration with the Patent & Trademark Office, U.S. Department of Commerce, we can add a useful perspective to the benefits and limitations associated with patents, trademarks, copyrights and many types of intellectual property considerations that need to be included in any management and planning which occur in the technology environments that presently affect businesses.

Two principal objectives in preparing client contracts involve memorializing where the respective parties are at the present time, and anticipating what circumstances can arise and how they would be addressed at a future time if they did. We provide clients with the benefit of risk assessment based on over thirty years of practice experience in order to draft contracts, whether brief or lengthy, that in each case reflect the most likely circumstances against which the respective documents will be tested over time.

Experience with complex corporate matters and with litigation allows us to look down the road and to advise clients what can be gained or lost through litigation, the time and costs to be expected, and the likely outcomes. This experience is invaluable because, perhaps without surprise, may non-attorneys form their opinions about litigation from their familiarity with a half-hour or hour television program, or from a short movie, rather than from the actual experience of how litigation operates in the real world. This type of information is especially of value in assessing arbitration and mediation options, through which we've obtained productive results for clients.

This specialty area has particularly diverse experience in our law practice, and we particularly enjoy working with clients on matters of health care law. Experience began through work with noted cancer researcher and chief of medicine Paul Calabresi, M.D., and publication of immunopharmacology research at Brown University. In follow-up to these studies, attorney registration is held with the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office. Experience in hospital administration was obtained through positions held at Roger Williams General Hospital in Providence, RI and at Danbury Hospital in Connecticut. Staff responsibilities for capital and operating budget reviews for acute care hospitals and for nursing homes were held as a staff member of the Connecticut Commission on Hospitals and Health Care. Health care products were managed at CIGNA for some of the country's largest national accounts, such as United Technologies, Stanley Tool and General Electric, which had over a million employees and dependents under its health care programs. Experience additionally included work with HMOs in Columbia, Maryland and with U.S. Healthcare, with employer-sponsored health care purchasing organizations, and with a variety of managed health care initiatives. Representation of health insurance reinsurers, health care providers, and third party administrators add to the perspective that we share with clients in working on respective projects with them.