In the following guest post, Frank Hülsberg, partner and member of the board of directors of Grant Thornton Germany, and Burkhard Fassbach, a D&O-lawyer in private practice in Germany, take a look at key whistleblower considerations relating to GDPR compliance. I would like to thank Frank and Burkhard for allowing me to publish their article. I welcome guest post submissions from responsible authors on topics of interest to this site’s readers. Please contact me directly…

Much has changed since I published my first coronavirus-related post a month ago. The number of confirmed cases and of deaths has soared. Much of the country is now on lockdown. School, work, business — so much of basic social and economic activity has stopped. Much has changed in the D&O arena as well. There have been both claims and underwriting developments, and a number of trends have emerged. In the post below, I discuss…

Three weeks ago, as part of a Professional Liability Underwriting Society (PLUS) series of recorded discussions on the professional liability insurance implications of the COVID-19 Coronavirus outbreak, I participated in a short recorded conversation on the viral outbreak’s D&O insurance implications with my good friends Carl Metzger of the Goodwin Procter law firm and Rob Yellen of Willis Towers Watson. Because so much has happened since that prior session just three short weeks ago, earlier…

As the number and rate of securities class action lawsuit filings has remained at historically high levels over the past three years, there have been renewed calls for securities class action litigation reform, as I have detailed in prior post (for example, here). According to a March 25, 2020 paper by the U.S. Chamber Institute of Legal Reform (ILR), the “broken securities class action system continues out of control” and the need for securities…

One of the questions for companies facing financial difficulties both in the U.S. and in the UK is the extent to which the boards of the companies owe duties to creditors to try to avoid creditors’ losses as the companies approach insolvency. I discussed the state of the law in Delaware regarding these issues in a recent post. In the following guest post, Francis Kean, a partner in the financial lines team at McGill…

Private investments funds (hedge funds, PE firms, venture capital funds and the like) are a significant part of the U.S. economy. From a management liability insurance perspective, private investment funds present unique underwriting and claims issues. In the following guest post, David Topol, takes a detailed look at these kinds of enterprises, and considers the relevant claims and insurance issues. David is a partner in the insurance practice at Wiley.  He has substantial experience over…

The current disruption to normal business operations across the country means that many businesses will soon be under significant financial pressure, if they are not there already. As their companies edge toward insolvency, directors are going to have to make significant decisions about the companies and their operations. Boards may be concerned, as they make critical and difficult decisions, that creditors or others may later attempt to claim that they violated their legal duties.  This…