How a Pa.-Based Boutique Firm Became a Go-To Cybersecurity Fixer
Since it was founded in 2016 by insurance lawyers from Lewis Brisbois Bisgaard & Smith, Lancaster County-based law firm Mullen Coughlin has been growing a roster of Big Law talent while amassing a growing share of the cybersecurity legal market.
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The development of cyber insurance as a product took place over a similar five-year time frame as the launch and growth of Mullen Coughlin. Cyber insurance has evolved into a popular product over the past five or six years, said James Carter, an insurance recovery counsel with Blank Rome, who litigates exclusively on behalf of corporate policyholders to maximize their coverage.
“Cyber insurance is a new product that has been in a state of evolution since it really was popularized about five years ago,” he said. Making things more complicated for policyholders, Carter said, is the lack of standardization for policies related to cyber events.
Five or six years ago, the focus of cyber insurance coverage was on data breaches, Carter said. Today, companies sometimes find their policies lacking in coverage for penalties resulting from increased regulatory scrutiny that could lead to penalties or cyber attacks that result in damaged property.
Ransomware, which coerces companies to pay up in order to reclaim data, could be a waning feature of cyber insurance plans, he said.
“As ransomware has become more frequent, the insurance industry has made noises about the need to cut back on cyber extortion coverage,” Carter said. “I think we’re going to start to see either elimination of that coverage or insurers continue to cover it but put some limits on it to curtail their liability for payment of ransomware.”
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“How a Pa.-Based Boutique Firm Became a Go-To Cybersecurity Fixer,” by Justin Henry, was published in The Legal Intelligencer and The American Lawyer on June 30, 2021.