Corporate Vision Issue 2 2019

34 CORPORATE VISION / Issue 2 2019 , 1810CV10 Led by President SusanNeuman and a teamof fellow top environmental experts, the Environmental Insurance Agency, Inc. (EIA) provides expert, integrated andholistic environmental insurance, technical and legal consulting services. To showcase her success in our 2018 Corporate Excellence Awards asMost InfluentialWoman inEnvironmental Insurance 2018 –USAwe profile Susan andher company to learnmore about the vital work theyundertake. Susan Neuman : An Expert in Environmental Coverage and Contracts Law EIA is a unique team of experts with several decades of environmental legal, engineering, and in- surance underwriting experience. President Susan Neuman spe- cialises in insurance and legal coverage. Before establishing EIA, she was outside coverage counsel to AIG Environmental at a large firm, where she litigated coverage disputes concerning Pollution Legal Liability (PLL) policies and redrafted the policies to prevent future disputes. She subsequently worked in house as Head of Product Development at the Home Insurance Company. Susan established EIA in 1997 and since then her ability to tailor policies to fit transactions and technical risks has ensured the success of numerous brownfields transactions. Alongside her work for EIA, Susan is also Brownfields Program Manager for NAESIP, a wholesale environmental insur- ance broker. As such, she draws on vast industry experience to lead EIA to excellence. She is supported by Don Rich- ardson, President of EWMA, a large engineering company, and Mark Manewitz, a New York and New Jersey “superlawyer” expert in the legal regulatory and environmental litigation space. Together they work to lower the costs resulting from the reduplica- tion and “siloing” characteristic of environmental transactions and claims handling, and to overcome the main barrier to successful and cost-effective environmental risk transfer, the highly technical nature of the risk. EIA’s competitors, other envi- ronmental insurance brokers primarily at large firms like Willis, have the necessary technical expertise but not the legal liability and contractual expertise. Thanks to its team of experts, EIA can quickly and economically provide an initial Liability Risk Strategy Review which does the following: defines the status of soil and groundwater contamination and status of remediation; it identifies gaps in the client’s work done to date, summarizes the liability exposures, reviews risk transfer options and makes recommen- dations based on the client’s in- demnification goals and business needs. This initial service can be rendered free or at very low cost. Additionally, EIA also provides Long Term Stewardship services that manage institutional and engineering controls (IC/ECs) over residual contamination left in place after active remediation is complete. EIA’s team can implement the Envirosure process which combines IC/EC Best Practices, including the Terradex web based continuous monitor- ing system, with a site pollution liability (SPL) policy that covers non-compliance with IC/ECs Drawing on Susan and Don’s vast experience in the field, EIA can provide expert testimony and litigation support in environmen- tal insurance coverage actions. Susan acted successfully as an expert for policyholders in over ten New Jersey coverage litiga- tion disputes involving the then hot issue of the availability of EIL insurance after 1985. The availa- bility or voluntary self-insurer rule set forth in the landmark Owens Illinois 1994 decision. requires that, under the pro rata allocation method, if a policyholder decides not to buy available insurance for a particular risk, it must cover a portion of the costs associated with claims arising during that period. If, however, there is no insurance available for purchase in certain years, the unavailability rule applies, and the policyholder does not have to pay a share of costs attributed to those years. The unavailability rule makes sense in the Owens Illinois or Stonewall context: thousands of asbestos products liability claims, and the certainty that in 1985, when asbestos exclusions were inserted in CGL policies, asbestos products liability coverage would be permanently unavailable in the market. It makes no sense at all in the typical context of the recent cases in the unavailability rule dispute, for example the Keyspan case, which involved one regu- latory claim for clean-up costs attributable to one particularly long occurrence of site environ- mental pollution at a manufac- tured gas plant (MGP) site. One reason is that the unavailability in the Owens Illinois/Stonewall con- text is very real, in the Keyspan type of context it is a fallacy in every sense of the word. Under the leading 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals Olin v. INA decision, coverage for periods after 1971 when the sudden and accidental pollution was inserted in CGL policies and before 1953, the date of the first policy, was available from policies Keyspan could have purchased between 1980 and 1985. The policies were claims made, not occurrence based, and covered pre-existing conditions without a retroactive date, In addition, they only had a single claims made trigger of coverage with a reporting tail of indefinite length, so a claim not made until 1995 would be covered.(See the Decker Manufacturing case, 1995 claim concerning a landfill used by Decker in the 1960’s and 1970’s, would have been covered