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Blank Rome Attys Talk COVID-19 Insurance Coverage Battles

Law360

Blank Rome LLP insurance recovery partners Jim Murray and Linda Kornfeld recently spoke with Law360 about how their practice group has been tackling clients' claims for business loss coverage amid the COVID-19 crisis, while adjusting to the new normal of working from home.

How has your practice group adapted to the pandemic?

Murray: Our group consists of 32 of us now in several offices, including New York, Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles. We collaborate and pitch work as a group. We are not limited by offices. I have not had a single case at Blank Rome that has not included at least one lawyer from one of the other offices.

Our group would typically have a monthly meeting of 45 minutes to an hour, where we discuss key cases and developments. We had always done that by video in our offices. When the pandemic hit and we finally ended up closing, we went from 14 offices to 1,000 home offices. For the insurance group, though, it was in some respects business as usual, as we continued with those meetings, bumping them up to every Friday instead of every month. We limit the meetings now to 30 minutes, and every week we have a speaker talk about one of their cases. We have had a lot of discussion about coronavirus cases, what we will and will not be doing in this area.

Kornfeld: It has really been a great thing to have such a close group in this pandemic situation. In my career, I have never been involved in any situation of this scope, where everyone in the group is thinking about the same issues at the same time. 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, Hurricane Sandy and other large-scale events in the past were geographically specific, where this event is impacting most everyone everywhere.

We are all reading insurance policies on a daily basis and analyzing those policies. We have such strong friendships that we are on the phone with each other all the time, trading ideas about policy language and potential arguments. Since we are such a tightly knit group, we have been able to use that fact to bring sophistication of analysis and thought to bear. We are putting all these smart coverage brains together and focusing at the same time on this specific issue, coverage for the pandemic. The level of intellectual discussion has been a silver lining of this situation.

For the firm as a whole, across all practice areas, we have been in much closer contact. Most everyone's clients have had some issue relating to the pandemic.


In their full interview with Law360, Jim and Linda further discuss:

  • What pandemic-related work has the group been doing?
  • What do you think of efforts to centralize COVID-19 coverage cases?
  • How have you been spending time outside work?

To read the full article, please click here.

“Blank Rome Attys Talk COVID-19 Insurance Coverage Battles,” by Jeff Sistrunk was published in Law360 on June 17, 2020.