Identifying, Quantifying, Contractually Allocating, and Insuring Against Environmental Liabilities and Obligations: Environmental 101 for Transactional Lawyers
Course Details
- smart_display Format
On-Demand
- signal_cellular_alt Difficulty Level
Intermediate
- work Practice Area
Environmental
- event Date
Thursday, July 20, 2023
- schedule Time
1:00 p.m. ET./10:00 a.m. PT
- timer Program Length
90 minutes
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This 90-minute webinar is eligible in most states for 1.5 CLE credits.
This CLE course will review both traditional and evolving environmental insurance products (e.g., pollution legal liability, cost cap, and excess of indemnity), escrows, contractual liability transfers, and other tools in the context of the cleanup and/or transfer of contaminated properties.
Counsel for all stakeholders with interest in contaminated properties: real estate, environmental, and bankruptcy counsel serving industrial clients, governments, Brownfield developers, remediation contractors, and PRP groups can benefit from quantifying and even reducing cleanup costs in a manner that is accurate, efficient, and will hold over time.
Contaminated properties present multiple financial risks: (1) costs for unknown pollutants and otherwise unanticipated remediation; (2) cost overruns for expected remediation; and (3) toxic tort and other private, third-party claims. For 20 years, parties relied on pollution legal liability insurance and, until 2011, on "cost cap" insurance to address these risks.
When traditional insurers stopped offering cost cap insurance in 2011, the environmental risk transfer industry developed alternative cost cap structures, as well as excess of indemnity insurance. Escrows, captives, trusts, annuities, and letters of credit work in conjunction with insurance to collateralize risk.
Listen as our panel composed of attorneys and insurance representatives discusses these tools as they have arisen and evolved over the last 20 years.
- Use of environmental insurance and other risk transfer tools to support fixed-price cleanups and purchases/sales of contaminated properties
- Why use
- When to use
- How to use
- Advantages and disadvantages
- Mechanics of tools
- Lessons learned
The panel will review these and other key issues:
- How can costs be best quantified and fixed?
- How can costs be best reduced?
- How can cleanup quality be best improved?
- What are the opportunities (and best means) of negotiating and scripting favorable language in policies, escrows, and other risk management tools?
- What are the challenges and pitfalls of using the various tools?
