If you are a company besieged by property damage or product liability claims, you will want to take note of the following: Your old general liability insurance can protect you. But you don’t have your old policies, you say? And your insurance agent has not kept old records?
Consider hiring an insurance archeologist. The insurance archeologist will conduct a search to determine what policies you had back when the damage was happening that provided general liability coverage. Most of these old policies were written to protect against the kinds of perils you now face years later. And they can protect you today in the right circumstances.
Even if an insurance archeologist doesn’t find an actual policy, he may retrieve enough evidence of general liability insurance to determine what the coverage was. How does that work?
Let’s say he finds some invoices that identify policy numbers and/or a copy of an insurance adjuster’s claims letter following that burglary back in 1977. The insurance archeologist can match the policy numbers against those policies in his policy form library and find a policy that was issued to another company by your insurer in 1977. Then he can provide you (or your attorney) with that policy to use as a specimen policy to determine what the conditions and exclusions in your policy were.
Taken together, this array of insurance policy evidence (although not your complete policy) is often enough evidence of insurance to file your claim with the correct insurance carrier and let them know that you are aware of the potential coverage that your policy provided.
Contact us today to learn more about insurance archeology services.
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