It was 20 years ago this week – on May 6, 2006 – that The D&O Diary published its first blog post. Two decades and literally thousands of blog posts later, The D&O Diary is still at it, still a “Periodic Journal,” still publishing “Items of Interest from the World of Directors and Officers Liability, With Occasional Commentary.”
The D&O Diary’s Origins
How did this come about? In early 2006, Kevin had changed jobs, going from D&O underwriting to wholesale D&O broking. At the beginning, the phone wasn’t exactly ringing off the hook. So, to stay active, and as a part of an experiment with what was at the time a new tech application, a Google app called “Blogger,” Kevin created The D&O Diary.
At the very beginning, there was no particular plan to maintain the blog, or even to have a blog. Kevin certainly had no idea that twenty years later he would still be at it, blogging away. Nor could he have foreseen that twenty years later he would view it as indispensable to prepare the blog for the future by bringing in the site’s first co-author, Sarah Abrams.
A few early developments clearly helped get the blog going. At the outset, at the very moment that the blog was coming into being in the early spring and summer of 2006, the Options Backdating Scandal was unfolding. It turned out to be a huge scandal, providing months and months of blog-worthy content. Prospective readers’ interest in the scandal drove traffic to the site. And from that point, The D&O Diary was up and running.
Next came the 2008 Global Financial Crisis. The D&O Diary began publishing items about mortgage-backed securities and collateralized debt obligations. It seemed the world of D&O insurance wanted – indeed, needed – to know more and more about these things. And so it has been throughout the years. The rise of cybersecurity concerns. The pandemic. The SPAC frenzy. The 2023 bank failures. The rise of AI. Geopolitics and D&O risk. And with each twist and turn, the site explored new topics and reached new readers.
The D&O Diary’s Readers
What do the numbers tell us? The site has about 9,000 subscribers. But perhaps more interestingly, since February 2013 (when the site implemented its current tracking protocols), the site has had over 9 million unique visitors, from over 160 countries.
Sarah was one of those subscribers. She was assigned The D&O Diary as required reading by a senior public company underwriter early on in her claims career when she began handling D&O matters in the early 2010s. From time to time, there were blog posts discussing cases in which she was involved, with useful discussion by Kevin or guest authors that provided helpful insight and ways to think about D&O coverage and litigation.
Sarah submitted her first guest post to Kevin and The D&O Diary in March 2021, “Achieving Organizational Diversity in the Wake of the Pandemic.” Sarah still remembers when Kevin responded that he would accept her submission for publication on The D&O Diary – it was, and remains, a professional highlight.
For both Sarah and Kevin, having the opportunity to publish articles on topics we find interesting is so rewarding. It allows us to communicate with fellow professionals throughout the industry and, more importantly, to form connections and friendships around the world.
The D&O Diary’s Values and Publications
Another thing that is very important to us is that over the last 20 years, The D&O Diary has developed some defining traditions – for example, the annual What to Watch issue, published in early September each year, and the annual Top Ten Stories from the World of D&O post, published in early January each year.
Another great tradition that we are very proud of is that we regularly feature guest posts from other professionals around the industry. We are happy to give others a platform to express their views and to share their ideas and information. We are grateful to everyone who has allowed us to publish their guest posts on this site.
One of the great things we have discovered over the years is that the flexibility of the blog format affords opportunities for some “off-road driving,” including the opportunity to publish off-topic articles, such as, for example, persistent time zone confusion (here), the future supply of fresh water and the reason you will be moving to Cleveland sometime in the 21st century (here), and the beautiful music of European football (soccer) players’ names (here). Indeed, the blog post with the single highest number of readers ever is our 2011 post entitled “The Single Best of Baseball Ever?” (here), Sadly, over the years, we have also found ourselves publishing obituaries as well.
The highest-profile examples of The D&O Diary’s off-topic articles are Kevin’s Travel Posts. Kevin enjoys writing these posts so much that he would continue to write and publish them even if no one read them. The good news is that many readers tell us that while they really appreciate the info on D&O insurance, they LOVE the travel posts. While we, too, love the travel posts, all of them, our favorite one of all is the very first one, about Kevin’s October 2011 visit to Amsterdam (here). For more about the Travel Posts, please see below.
Highs and Lows
Not everything we have tried over the years has worked out. One project Kevin tried to get going was a feature called Sunday Arts. It was intended as a weekend forum for cultural topics – the arts, literature, and history. Kevin still thinks that there were some pretty good articles in the Sunday Arts series. Our favorite is the 2021 article about the art of Francisco Goya (here).
Kevin learned two things in pursuing the Sunday Arts project. The first is that the Sunday Arts posts required an immense amount of time to plan and prepare, much more time and effort than more conventional blog posts. Second, Kevin learned that, sadly, there was not much interest in the Sunday Arts – or maybe it was just that there wasn’t interest in the arts on Sundays (except from Sarah, who minored in Art History in college).
Kevin remains proud of the Sunday Arts posts, but he recognized he had to make a concession to reality and allow the series to die a natural death.
The D&O Diary Merch
On the other hand, there have been some interesting projects that did work out. Possibly the project that generated the most reader interest was The D&O Diary mugs. The deal for readers was that they could get a free D&O Diary mug, but in exchange the readers had to send back a photo of their mug, preferably in an interesting setting. The pictures readers sent in included pictures taken at The White House, at the U.S. Supreme Court, in Sydney, in Rotterdam, in Jerusalem, in Singapore, in Alaska, and innumerable other locations as well. It was all great fun. There was a follow-up project involving Tenth Anniversary D&O Diary frisbees as well.
It would have been fun to have a D&O Diary giveaway for the 20th anniversary, but shipping costs recently have escalated so substantially that the idea of a 20th anniversary giveaway proved to be prohibitively expensive.
Deep Thoughts and Favorite Posts
There are a number of the more conventional posts that we are also quite proud of, as well. Among the many articles we published over the years, one particular item that stands out for us is the 2012 post entitled “Meditations on the Meaning of Relatedness” (here), which is noteworthy, at least in Kevin’s mind, for the following paragraph:
“Relatedness” is not self-defining. It is, in fact, a concept that recedes away from you the harder you try to think about it. At a certain level of generalization, everything in the universe is related, all joined together in the all-powerful and all-knowing mind of almighty God. Yet from another perspective, nothing is related, as all of creation consists of nothing more than chaotic, swirling bits of matter randomly spinning away within the cosmic void.
But of all the posts over all the years, Kevin’s favorite post is his 2012 post entitled “Summer Time,” about life at his lake house in Pentwater, Michigan (here). Kevin likes the post so much that it has become an annual feature of this site, reprinted annually every July 4 weekend, to encourage everyone to be sure to savor summertime.
Sarah has her own favorite D&O Diary posts from the many years she was one of the blog’s readers. She particularly liked the post with our Readers’ Travel Pictures and Hacks and the Sunday Arts post that discussed the artist J.M.W. Turner. Sarah also found The D&O Diary’s June 2016, cyber disclosure post to be an early and important identification of the ways that cyber disclosure concerns that can give rise to securities litigation. And the first D&O Diary Post discussing COVID-era event-driven litigation against Norwegian Cruise Lines reinforced that real world events often translate into D&O claims. As we have discussed on the D&O Diary recently with conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East, event-driven litigation continues to be a driver of securities suits.
Final Thoughts
What will the next 20 years bring for The D&O Diary? We hope we will continue to provide you with timely articles about Items of Interest from the World of Directors and Officers Liability. Kevin hopes that Sarah will figure out a way to fulfill one of his long-standing ambitions for the site, by figuring out how to publish a scratch-and-sniff edition.
Sarah’s hope as co-author of the D&O Diary is, above all, to maintain the standards that this platform has set over the past 20 years. Sarah also hopes that over time, the site will launch and establish new traditions, as well.
Both Kevin and Sarah also recognize that, over time, the way our readers consume information has changed. That has implications for the way we deploy our content. We recently created a D&O Diary LinkedIn page for followers to engage with and we plan to launch a D&O Diary Podcast Series soon. We hope that diversifying the way we distribute our content will allow us to reach and connect with more people. The engagement we have built with the professional liability insurance community is so important to us and we hope to continue and to deepen that engagement, for years to come.
Our final act as part of this anniversary celebration is to thank our readers. Your interest and communications have kept us motivated. So many of our best ideas and blog post topics have come from readers’ suggestions. It never ceases to amaze us – we type up our little blog posts and publish them on the Internet, and people from all over the world come to our site and read what we have written. That is a very special thing, for which we are eternally grateful.
Thank you, dear readers, from the bottom of our hearts.
Two Decades of Travel Pictures: As one last celebratory gesture in recognition of this site’s 20th anniversary, Kevin wanted to share a small sampling of the many travel pictures he has posted to this site. The travel pictures are relevant here because the blog itself made so much of the travel possible. Kevin freely concedes that including the travel pictures is totally self-indulgent, but he hopes that including the pictures will add a bit of color and flash to the anniversary celebration. Please enjoy the pictures.
The picture of Jerusalem seems like the obvious and natural place to end the photo retrospective, but Kevin couldn’t resist adding one more picture. In and of itself, the last picture below is seemingly unremarkable and undoubtedly at first glance will seem out of place with the other pictures shown above. The seemingly humdrum picture captures something important.
