One of the great things about having a blog is that it has brought me into contact with a host of people I might otherwise never have gotten to know. Among the most interesting and colorful people I have met through my blog is Sammy Antar, Crazy Eddie’s cousin, and the author of the White Collar Crime blog (here). Regular readers will recall my recent post referring to Sammy and his views, here. As a result of my post, Sammy called me up and we had a great conversation about a number of things, including D & O insurance. Among other things, Sammy wondered why D & O insurers don’t condition their coverage on certain remedial or preventive measures, the way bank lenders require covenants on their loans or property insurers require for their policies.
Sammy’s question is one I have encountered again and again from thoughtful people outside the D & O insurance industry. A more scholarly example of this perennial question is presented in the November 17, 2006 law review article entitled "The Missing Monitor in Corporate Governance: The Directors’ and Officers’ Liability Insurer," (here) written by Professors Tom Baker of the University of Connecticut Law School and Sean Griffith of the Fordham Law School (here). Baker and Griffith’s well-researched, well-written, thoughtful and thought-provoking article examines the same question that Sammy Antar posed to me: why don’t D & O insurers perform more of a corporate governance monitoring function?
The authors recognize the role D & O insurers theoretically might now be playing by offering lower priced insurance to companies with better governance practices. However, as the authors also recognize, competitive pressures and insurers’ zeal for premium volume limit carriers’ price differentiating ability and undercut the role insurance cost might otherwise play in motivating behavior. I would add that factors unrelated to governance, such as a company’s size or industry, are almost always more important pricing criteria, and so even in ideal circumstances, D & O insurance pricing would provide at best a weak incentive to corporate governance behavior. In addition, for most companies during most phases of the insurance cycle, the relatively minor variations in their D & O insurance costs are unlikely to have any impact on corporate governance behavior because the dollars involved are too slight.
The authors then look at whether D & O insurers are affirmatively offering loss prevention services, the way many property or workers’ compensation insurers do. The authors conducted extensive empirical research by interviewing many underwriters, brokers and risk managers. Their empirical research showed that despite logical incentives for them to do so, D & O insurers do not affirmatively provide or offer their insureds loss prevention services. (Full disclosure: I was among the insurance industry representatives the authors interviewed as part of their empirical research.) Not only that, the authors found that D & O insurers don’t even manage claims that arise under their policies, but rather allow their insureds to select defense counsel and manage the defense, in a way that leaves defense expense essentially uncontrolled. The authors conclude that the D & O insurers’ failure to provide loss prevention services and to manage claims allows management conduct to continue without the checking function the insurer might provide. In addition, because most D & O claims settle within the limits of the D & O insurance, company management is permitted to shift all of the consequences of their behavior away from themselves.
The authors examine the purpose and impact of D & O insurance under these circumstances and conclude that companies continue to buy D & O insurance because it provides company officials with a corporately-financed way for management to protect themselves from their own liability exposure without the requirements of any constraints on their behavior. The authors conclude that affairs are arranged this way because it suits corporate managers, who are free to indulge in risky behavior secure in the belief that their D & O insurance will protect them and their company if there are any problems. The authors question whether shareholders’ interests are served by this arrangement, and whether the existence of D & O insurance (or at least corporate reimbursement and entity coverage) creates a moral hazard by insulating companies and their managers from the consequences of their behavior.
Readers familiar with my professional history know that I am perhaps uniquely qualified to comment on the reasons why D & O insurers do not offer loss prevention services. My curriculum vitae includes an extended deployment as the head of a D & O facility that was founded on the optimistic premise that a D & O insurer ought to provide loss prevention services and that offering those services would be a competitive advantage. This noble experiment died a death of many causes, and having presided over the enterprise’s life span, I can authoritatively recite here why D & O insurers do not offer loss prevention services, as follows:
1. Everybody Has to Do It or Nobody Can Do It: Corporate insurance buyers want their acquisition of D & O insurance to be as uncomplicated and consume as little time as possible. Even if a D & O insurer is offering free services that will help improve their company’s risk profile, the company’s managment will not desire the services if the services take additional time and attention. As long as there is one competitor anywhere who will offer the same coverage (at least at the same or similar cost, more about which below) without requiring the company to "jump through hoops," the free services will go unclaimed. Of course, this is not universally true, there are some companies that will value the service, and there are other companies who could learn to appreciate the value of the services. More about these kinds of companies below.
2. Even if the Services Are Very High Quality, They Will be Undervalued in the Marketplace: Unfortunately, insurance companies are not held in the highest regard in corporate America. Too many companies view their D & O carriers with suspicion or even hostility. To be sure, there are some companies who welcome their D & O insurers’ views about corporate governance, but not enough to make the costs of providing the services economically self-sustaining. Corporate management’s suspicious views of their D & O insurers may be encouraged by the their outside counsel. While some lawyers (and I was always proud that it was the best lawyers) welcomed the provision of high quality loss prevention services, there were other lawyers who viewed an insurer’s provision of these services as a competitive threat for services the lawyers themselves wanted to provide or as some clever ruse to permit the insurer to deny coverage later.
3. The D & O Pricing Environment Does Not Support the Pricing Premise: Some companies might want their D & O insurer’s loss prevention services but not if their companies have to pay for the services. It might be possible for a D & O insurer to insist on corporate governance reforms if the insurer could offer demonstrable insurance cost savings for qualifying companies, but the reality is that the D & O insurance sector has been and remains so competitive that it is impossible to show cost savings. There is always a competitor willing to offer the same or similar coverage at the same (or better) discount, and so companies who might otherwise accept their insurer’s loss prevention requirements have little monetary incentive to do so.
4. Loss Prevention Services Are Costly To Provide and Maintain: For a D & O insurer to plausibly offer credible loss prevention services recognized as valuable by senior corporate executives , the insurer has to be willing to make and sustain a very significant investment in high quality personnel. However, top management at insurance companies, who rarely have background in D & O insurance but rather are drawn from more mainstream property or casualty insurance backgrounds, and who view the business of insurance as a high volume low skill enterprise, have little appreciation for or patience with the need for this kind of investment. These kinds of expenses do put significant pressure on operating margins, and indeed ultimately may not be economically justifiable given the pricing environment that has prevailed in the D & O insurance industry for almost all of the last 20 years (except for a very brief period during 2002-03).
5. D & O Loss Prevention Has Less Certain Benefits than A Sprinkler System Does: A sprinkler’s system’s benefit is direct and easily understood. Good corporate governance may or may not have as direct of a benefit. Baker and Griffith seem to assume that loss prevention can improve companies and reduce their securities litigation risk. I still believe this to be true, but at the same time I have to acknowledge that a company can do everything right and still get sued. So many of the major D & O claims problems of the last few years have come from unexpected directions. Sector slides, industry contagions, practices that are widespread and accepted that suddenly become perceived as objectionable, these are all phenomena that caused boatloads of D & O losses in recent years that no amount of loss prevention would have prevented.
I could go on and on about the reasons D & O insurers don’t offer loss prevention services. (Buy me a few beers sometime and I will keep it going for hours.) In fact, Baker and Griffith mention in their article a few additional factors that I did not even get to here. But I think I have shown that there are many reasons why D & O insurers do not provide these services. This fact may be lamentable, but unless circumstances change dramatically in ways I do not anticipate, this is just the way things are and seemingly will remain in the D & O insurance industry.
That said, I cannot support the Professors’ conclusion that D & O insurance as it is currently purchased by most companies is a moral hazard. This particular topic is well beyond the scope of the informal blog format, but I will briefly offer my views for disagreeing with the Professors.
It is extremely unlikely that the presence of D & O insurance operates as any kind of an enabler of bad behavior: I flatter my chosen field by thinking that D & O insurance is pretty important stuff, but I am realistic enough to understand that corporate managers conduct their operations in a way that they think is either in the company’s or their own best interests without regard to their D & O insurance. They don’t stop before taking an action and reflect that they wouldn’t do it if they didn’t have D & O insurance. I view it as an extremely remote and unlikely theoretical possibility that corporate managers do anything they wouldn’t otherwise do because their company has D & O insurance.
Corporate Managers Worry More About Potential Consequences For Which There is No Insurance: Corporate managers know that the same kind of conduct can attract the unwanted attention of plaintiffs’ lawyers can also attract the unwanted attention of the SEC and the Department of Justice. Even if D & O insurance were to cease to exist as an earthly phenomenon tomorrow, most senior officials’ conduct would go on exactly as before (that is, equally as good or bad as before) because the admonitory threat of the regulators’ actions would remain as before. That is, because of the threat of regulatory action, the theoretical possibility that D & O insurance might otherwise operate as a moral hazard simply doesn’t exist.
Most Corporate Managers Truly Want to Do the Right Thing: There are crooks out there; my comments here don’t apply to them. In my experience, most corporate managers are interested in playing by the rules, and more importantly, for being known for playing by the rules. The idea of seeing their name in the paper as accused of fraud is absolutely mortifying. The fact that there might be insurance to eliminate the monetary inconvenience of a securities fraud lawsuit is irrelevant to their desire to avoid the kind of reputational taint that might follow an accusation of fraud, even if the accusation were merely to be made by plaintiffs’ lawyers.
Because I truly believe that almost all corporate officials want to do the right thing, I think there may yet be a role for loss prevention services in the D & O insurance equation. I am an eternal optimist, and I continue to believe that high quality loss prevention services will be valued by some companies and ought to be valued by all companies. I also believe that D & O insurance professionals can and ought to offer these services.
It may be that competitive forces between and among D & O insurers will discourage the insurers from carrying the experiment forward. Brokers, by contrast to insurers, are in the business of providing consultative services, and for that reason I believe that highly qualified brokers could offer loss prevention services to their D & O clients. Baker and Griffith looked briefly as what the past practices may have been as far as brokers offering these kinds of services and concluded that brokers are not offering these services. My recent entry into a new livelihood as a D & O broker is premised on the possibility that brokers have a role to play here. I have experience in this area, after all. Anybody that wants to talk to me about it should give me a call — I have already had a great telephone conversation with Sammy Antar about it.
Hat tip to Adam Savett at the Lies, Damned Lies blog (here) for the link to Professors Baker and Griffith’s law review article.
A prior D & O Diary post commenting on an earlier article by Professors Baker and Griffith can be found here.