Summary:

From time to time many of you have requested that the Risk Management Group review contractual indemnity provisions as part of the SureWATCH® suite of services offered by Sterling & Sterling.

NOTE:

We can only review indemnity and hold harmless provisions.  We CANNOT review insurance requirements.  The Sterling Insurance Team is responsible for reviewing insurance requirements.

The Risk Management Group at Sterling is managed by Lia Krautmanis and Dianne Haines.

The purpose of  this analysis is to determine whether:

  1. The proposed indemnity language can be improved;
  2. Whether we can suggest a reasonable form for the specific purposes of the client; and
  3. Whether the indemnification obligation falls outside of the client’s insurance.

We now receive several of these requests a day, and do our best to accommodate them, but given other obligations there are inevitable delays.

We have made a few decisions about this service:

  • We cannot sacrifice the quality of this analysis by having unqualified people at Sterling give their opinion;
  • We have to be fair – 1st come; 1st served
  • We can only use our service for Sterling clients; we do not have the time to perform this service for prospects [nor should we; not only would we be giving away a valuable service, but we would be allowing them to use our expertise unsupervised, creating a potential E&O situation]

It is our hope that this revised team will be in a position to better address the firm’s needs in responding to client requests.

Procedure:

In order for us to control the work flow here is what we will need you to complete the request form: Click to Request Risk Transfer Analysis

Please note that we will need the following Completed Request Form in order to proceed.

Required Information:

  1. Name of client, TAM ID
  2. Annual Account Revenue
  3. Client’s role in the contract
  4. Need by date for analysis
  5. Copy of the contract or documents to be reviewed
  6. Identify where the clause is located in the contract
  7. Plain English description of what you need

If you have any questions, please contact the legal team.

riskmanagement1@sterlingrisk.com

Procedures and Ground Rules:

In order for this process to work, the following ground rules must be followed:

  1. We are only permitted to advise re risk transfer language: insurance regulations prohibit an insurance brokerage from giving general legal advice; brokers may only give advice on risk transfer strategies. Please do not ask us to draft other types of contractual provisions – we are not permitted to do so.
  2. Non-attorney staff should not review/advise re risk transfer language: This poses a significant liability risk to Sterling. All requests should be submitted using this procedure. No non-attorneys should be giving advice re indemnity language.
  3. We need certain core information to analyze risk transfer portions of a contract:
    1. We will need at least the following information:
      1. A copy of the basic contract that requires analysis; and
      2. The identity of who our client is in the contract.
    2. If a form rider is requested, we will need a full description of why the client needs such a form.
  4. We cannot provide “open ended” forms for use by clients. The provision of general forms without any analysis is poor practice [at best], and could subject Sterling to liability if such forms are misused. As a result, we will not be supplying general forms unless we are first sure of the intended use, and have analyzed the risk transfer strategy.
  5. We will leave advice re the content of contractual insurance provisions to other professionals at Sterling: This means that our team will advise re risk transfer contractual provisions; we will leave it to other insurance professionals at Sterling to advise clients re insurance requirements, limits, etc.