Benefits & ERISA Law

The Three Rules of the Tripartite Relationship

We’ve been a little ERISA heavy here for awhile now, somewhat to the detriment of the insurance litigation half of the blog’s title, simply because of the range of interesting events that have taken place under the ERISA rubric lately. While all that was going on, though, a particularly good collection of articles on different insurance coverage topics have crossed my (electronic) desktop, and I want to pass them along as well; I will try to scatter them in with other posts over the next week or so, until I exhaust them.

One I wanted to pass along is this article here, by two prominent policyholder attorneys, on the tripartite relationship, which concerns the potentially conflicting loyalties of defense counsel appointed by an insurer to defend an insured against a lawsuit that may or may not be covered. This problem stems from the fact that insurers are often obligated to provide insureds with a defense against cases that may turn out, upon further development of the facts of the case, to not actually be covered, in which event the insurer will not have to cover any judgment or settlement, and might even be entitled to recoup from the insured the amount paid to defend the case in certain circumstances and jurisdictions.

Although there is much written and said about the tripartite relationship, the whole topic comes close to falling into the much sound and fury signifying nothing realm, although not completely because there is some substance to the issue, only not as much as lawyers like to make it out to be. The whole issue can really be boiled down to three handy rules of thumb. First, the defense counsel appointed by the insurer must focus only on defending the case as though the insured were his or her only client, and cannot muddle about between the insurer and the insured over any coverage issues that remain outstanding. Second, the insurer needs to retain separate lawyers, in the role of so-called coverage counsel, to take the factual information developed by defense counsel in defending the case and evaluate how it affects coverage. And third, an insured must remember that the defense counsel is solely going to defend the case, without regard to coverage disputes and is not looking out for the insured’s interests with regard to whether any recovery in the case will actually be covered; the insured has to instead hire independent coverage counsel of its own to take steps to parlay the evidence developed by the defense counsel into a commitment of coverage by the insurer.

Full post as published by Boston ERISA Law Blog on January 07, 2008 (boomark / email).