Insurance defense and personal injury work are designated to their own unique, if narrow, sectors of the legal industry. But for insurance recovery teams, who represent corporate policyholders looking to cash in on their insurance policies, the work touches on nearly every industry and client segment cherished by Big Law.
That breadth is key to the success of the insurance recovery team at Blank Rome, originally a 14-lawyer segment of a 100-attorney acquisition in 2016 from Dickstein Shapiro as that once robust Washington firm closed doors. Now, Blank Rome’s insurance recovery group has expanded to include 46 attorneys and has proven a key revenue generator for the firm.
“The addition of this group 10 years ago has been a big part of our success,” said Blank Rome chair and managing partner Grant Palmer. “It’s wonderful to have this unbelievable level of expertise—every client needs this and we have it to provide to our clients.”
According to Blank Rome’s insurance recovery practice co-chair James Murray, only five or six other firms focus solely on policyholder insurance recovery work.
“It’s a historical phenomenon,” he explained. “A lot of the big firms were representing insurance companies already. Some (that) had directors and officers’ litigation or securities litigation were beholden to insurance companies’ panel work, which will pay higher rates in cases that involve extensive liabilities for blue chip clients.”
“For a lot of firms that were on panels for AIG, they couldn’t sue AIG,” Murray continued. “If I couldn’t sue AIG, half my arm is gone.”
Naturally, that ongoing representation of insurance carriers created conflicts that limited where Murray and his team could join once Dickstein Shapiro sought a merger with another law firm.
“By the end of 2015, we decided to combine with someone. Candidates included very few big firms as most had conflicts we couldn’t deal with,” Murray recalled. “We were getting ready to go our own way, and Blank Rome said they were open to a practice that exclusively dealt with policyholders, and that commitment started right away.”
Since joining the firm, Murray’s group has grown from 14 to 46 attorneys helping handle insurance recovery matters. Murray noted that most of the practice’s growth has involved laterals that the group was already familiar with, given the smaller nature of the insurance recovery legal market.
“We’re a small enough market to do this so that most of our growth has been with people we knew in one way or another—almost everyone in the group we’ve taken in as laterals we knew from different contexts,” Murray said. “We knew they would add value in terms of their specialties and knew they would be good in terms of fitting into the group.”
With that growth comes the ability to handle more matters involving more practices, a unique feature of the insurance recovery group as it works with clients across nearly all of Blank Rome’s practices.
“With globalization, more sophisticated policyholders, and insurance underwriting being more aggressive, this area has burgeoned into almost every area practiced in the firm,” Murray said. “In terms of cross-practice integration, there are very few practices at Blank Rome that we don’t contribute to in one way or another.”
In fact, Murray and his team described waves of different industry-focused insurance recovery disputes. Murray indicated that his practice back in the 1980s was focused on asbestos and environmental-related work; since then, the group has expanded into areas such as product liability and entertainment, said insurance recovery co-chair Linda Kornfeld. Data security, sex abuse coverage and bankruptcy are also growth areas, Murray added.
Despite working across a broad array of industry sectors and practice groups at the firm, Murray and his fellow co-chairs all indicated that the nature of their work in insurance recovery generally contains through-lines that make it easy for them to pivot as a new trend arises.
“Those trends or waves come in a new area, and we understand the insurance business and the players and we deal with the players,” insurance recovery co-chair John Gibbons explained. “You take your understanding of the insurance market as baseline, ask, ‘What is this market? Who are the key players within it?’… The principles we learned going through a lot of different battles allow us to pivot into the new trend areas.”
“We also see these trends pretty early on and can get a good bit of expertise before cases start hitting at large numbers,” Gibbons said.
Murray added that there’s a certain level of standardization in insurance policies, which also helps the team pivot between trends.
“Most times these are standard form policies and words mean certain things. Insurance policies also typically have big claim exclusions—if a claim is big enough, a carrier will fight the coverage even if they would have paid the claim had it been a smaller amount,” Murray claimed. “Those kinds of themes we keep an eye on and so we’re ready to roll.”
"10 Years After Arrival, Blank Rome’s Insurance Recovery Group Drives Firmwide Growth," by Amanda O'Brien was published in The Legal Intelligencer on February 27, 2026. Reprinted with permission.
