Confidential Insurance Archeology

PolicyFind conducts Confidential Insurance Archeology® to locate lost or unknown insurance policies to provide claims coverage. These historical insurance policies are assets that can be worth millions of dollars and can be leveraged in legal defense, in cost-sharing of defense and settlements.

WE’VE FOUND OVER $6 BILLION IN USABLE INSURANCE ASSETS

The retrieval or reconstruction of a lost or misplaced CGL insurance policy can protect a company from severe financial loss. A well-conducted insurance archaeology project can provide millions of dollars in defense costs and indemnity to business owners faced with response costs for injuries and damages occurring under previous management but surfacing recently. 

Our insurance archeology services locate insurance evidence to enhance known coverage, reconstruct corporate histories, and identify and locate other responsible parties. We use an effective combination of computer-based research, personal interviews, and boots-on-the-ground investigative techniques to gather leads and track down the evidence needed to reconstruct our client’s insurance coverage portfolio. We have one of the largest specimen policy libraries to ground-truth evidence of coverage and help reconstruct potentially missing portions of policies. Our coverage charts depict which policies were in place during each policy period to determine insurance claims options.

For policyholders who have already spent their own funds to address liabilities, we try to recover expenses relating to environmental remediation, product recalls, and other expenditures made before the policyholder could access their historical coverage.

Specimen Policy Library

PolicyFind uses a myriad of proprietary sources to find actual policies or significant evidence of coverage. Our extensive specimen policy contains hundreds of general liability and excess liability insurance policies to ground truth evidence of coverage and help reconstruct potentially missing portions of policies.

Our specimen policy library provides the additional information need to determine the terms, conditions and limits of coverage for policies that are identified by evidence of coverage, such as cancelled checks, ledger entries or certificates of insurance that provide policy numbers. The same policy type issued to a similar insured by the same insurance company during the same policy period can provide valuable information needed to determine the coverage provided by the missing policy. These policies are available to you or your attorney for generic use as evidence of which policy forms were in use by which carriers during a given policy period.

Litigation Support

PolicyFind specializes in insurance document analysis and expert testimony regarding the development of liability policy language and the history of liability insurance. As expert witnesses, we bring our vast insurance knowledge to bear in support of motions for declaratory judgment where the court’s decision is sought concerning the defense or indemnity obligations of particular liability insurance policies.

We assist in document management in asbestos, silica, toxic tort, product liability, and environmental property damage cases for defense or plaintiff’s counsel. Additionally, we network with Enviroforensics, an environmental consulting and engineering firm, who provides scientists as expert witnesses in the field of environmental property damage. An experienced staff of geologists, engineers, hydrogeologists, and other environmental experts are available to address source identification, fate and transport, rate and extent, human health and ecological risk assessment at environmental contamination sites.

Corporate History Reconstruction

PolicyFind performs a full historical insurance audit as part of corporate mergers and acquisitions due diligence process of manufacturers and distributors. Corporations acquiring ownership of present-day companies risk acquiring potential liabilities with roots in the past practices of the companies they acquire. 

Our insurance archeologists retrieve and copy accounting, corporate history and sales records at the target company’s facilities. Then, they review documents at off-site insurance archives to reassemble the target company’s historic insurance program. The documents are examined to determine what coverage potential they may provide to protect the acquiring corporation from the pollution or toxic tort claims of the future. An assessment of what insurance assets the acquiring company takes with it from the target company is an essential component of the acquisition process and can make or break a deal where future liabilities are almost certain to emerge.

Having a bank of insurance policies to fall back on to weather the legal storms that the future may bring makes good business sense. Our ability to search for, locate and assemble the insurance documents required to protect the acquiring corporation from this long-tail liability can be worth millions of dollars, and yet is perhaps the least expensive part of the entire acquisitions process.

Insurance Policy Audit

PolicyFind conducts audits to review and evaluate which policies that businesses have in their possession and determine which policy years are missing. Whether acting proactively, responding to a PRP notice from an environmental agency, or responding to a lawsuit, companies benefit from searching their internal records for insurance policy information.

The audit is the first step in any insurance archaeology project. The document review process begins at the corporate headquarters but continues at branch locations where insurance documents relating to companies acquired during mergers or acquisitions are stored. Once all policies and proofs of insurance are assembled, gaps in the company’s historic insurance program present themselves and specific plans can be made to locate missing insurance policies and proofs at locations outside the organization.

When corporations are armed with their historic insurance program, corporate risk managers and their attorneys can determine which carriers are to be noticed for which claims and what coverage limits are available to offset which potential expenditures.

We specialize in conducting audits on our clients’ behalf. Our experience in combing through dated materials and assembling insurance policy evidence is unsurpassed.

PRP Search

PolicyFind conducts document searches to reconstruct corporate history and determine other past owners, and identify operators, transporters and generators at the site that may also have liability. Our Potentially Responsible Party (PRP) searchers conduct interviews with knowledgeable persons to determine the current whereabouts of other companies or individuals and locate documentation linking them to the waste site.

When regulatory agencies, municipalities or private property owners discover soil and groundwater contamination, the most obvious legally liable parties (responsible parties) are commonly the first to receive a demand. The most obvious party can be only one in a history of past owners and operators, waste transporters or generators that may have contributed to the environmental impairment. This means companies can be unfairly singled out for environmental expenditures, which makes it important to take out a defensive measure by requesting a PRP Search.  

When other potentially responsible parties are found, their insurance assets can contribute to what your insurance assets cannot. Even if PRPs are discovered to be bankrupt or insolvent, their insurance policies may provide defense and indemnity at sites these PRPs helped pollute.