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Area Executive Vice President
Arthur J. Gallagher, San Francisco
joan_dove@ajg.com

Broker as Trusted Teammate

When you've specialized in a particular industry for more than 20 years, you can afford to turn down business. At least that's what Joan Dove does.

"She's very selective of her customers," said the risk manager of a Southeastern metropolitan YMCA. "She wants to make sure that the commitment is there and it is willing to live up to the rigorous safety expectations," he said.

Dove began working with this YMCA when its mutual captive closed its doors.

"The only other broker we were willing to look at was Joan at Gallagher," he said. Why? Because she had already established a reputation of clearly understanding YMCAs' broad range of risks. "She makes sure we have the proper coverages, especially for the high-risk areas, such as transportation, aquatics and child care. We work with thousands of kids on a daily basis."

Dove's program includes background and reference checks on volunteers, employee, training and other requirements, like having at least two adults with a child.

Transportation presents another major risk, when children are driven from their schools to the Y's after-school program. So Dove insisted that all bus drivers receive the proper training through Travelers' (their insurance company) transportation safety classes. Dove and her teammates also conduct risk management training and evaluations. "The added bonus we got by switching to Gallagher and Joan's program was individualized attention," the risk manager said.

Vice President, Resource Director, Charitable and Social Enterprise Practice Alliance
Aon, Parsippany, N.J.
Gary_Eppinger@ars.com

CASE Closed

Gary Eppinger is the other half of the CASE--Charitable and Social Enterprise--team who, along with Matthew Schneider, created the practice last year to address what they believed was a lack of industry focus on the large CASE nonprofits. Both are Power Broker^TM winners for these efforts.

When the Eppinger-Schneider team took on a new client, a major charitable health organization, they launched a risk management needs assessment program. The program, a formal loss control and risk mitigation process, is designed to help charitable and social enterprise risk organizations understand their risks, as well as identify the means to mitigate exposures.

"One of the first things they did was get all our brochures together, interview all our department heads and understand where our insurance gaps were," said the vice president and risk manager of the organization.

This was part of CASE's "Employees/Volunteers 360 Degree," a platform Eppinger developed to assess, understand and work with the complex labor/employment relationships charitable enterprises use in their daily operations.

This allowed them to uncover gaps and overlap between workers' compensation, general liability, disability and accident coverages, and to institute cost-saving techniques.

"They expanded our coverage and still saved us $80,000," said the risk manager.

Vice President
The James B. Oswald Co., Cleveland
kmiller@oswaldcompanies.com

It's Always Miller's Time

It's not all that unusual for brokers to run a risk assessment with a new client. But it is unusual when the client is a private boarding and day school located in the Midwest with 380 high school students, of which 250 live on campus. The results of the risk assessment opened everyone's eyes.

"It was very enlightening," said the institution's chief financial officer. The school brought in Kathleen Miller and her team from the James B. Oswald Co., who brought to bear their years of experience. "They knew where the risks were at and said, 'Here's what we need to address' to our risk committee and the board," he said.

As the school navigated its way through the renewal process with its new broker, it found that in some cases it had too much coverage and that in other cases it didn't have enough. It lacked enough coverage on campus buildings and was underinsured on its business interruption. "Although we added value, we did not see a tremendous increase. All told, it was about $160,000 to $180,000."

But the sharpest thorn was a legacy claim stemming from a lab experiment gone awry when a teacher and two students were injured. The claim combined a "minor" workers' comp settlement, and everything else was liability. It totaled between $10 million to $20 million.

In negotiating with the carrier during renewal, Miller, her team and the school reviewed the institution's lab policy, added flame-retardant equipment and ordered that all lab procedures be documented.

Area Executive Vice President
Arthur J. Gallagher, San Francisco
dennis_ohara@ajg.com

Gaining Converts

You might think that a broker confronted with trying to secure sexual misconduct liability coverage for a pool of Roman Catholic dioceses would require some kind of spiritual intervention, or at least a bunch of Hail Marys.

But Dennis O'Hara was able to turn a sizeable excess sexual misconduct liability insurance program into a new facility using two tactics. First, the facility pooled the buying power of eight dioceses to negotiate and secure coverage for the Catholic Church. That alone was an achievement. There hadn't been a market for this Western state's risks since the church's sexual abuse scandal emerged in 2002.

"Insurance was previously unattainable in the United States and in our state," said the chief financial officer of a diocese.

Second, O'Hara was able to secure retroactive coverage for new claims alleged to have occurred going back to the 1980s. The program was able to do this by using client research and convincing underwriters that the church jurisdictions were facing fewer risks because of risk management programs instituted in each diocese.

"Our credibility in the markets was being able to tell people that the issues in the church had been dealt with and we were now insurable," said the CFO.

The coverage was placed with a group of underwriters at Lloyd's. Lead underwriter A.F. Beazley was willing to listen.

"Quite frankly, this was a major accomplishment," said the CFO.

Managing Director, Religious and Nonprofit Practice
Arthur J. Gallagher, Itasca, Ill.
peter_persuitti@ajg.com

A Broker Saint Named Peter

Peter Persuitti's name has practically become synonymous with the brokerage community's religious practice. "He's the go-to person," said the general manager of a religious denominational captive, and Persuitti is not even his broker. "If you need him, you go talk to him," he said.

Most recently, this captive manager was looking for a better way to cover risks facing a denominational group of self-insured schools. For years, each school had its own individual insurance program, which was inefficient. The manager wanted to group the risks so he could offer a broader package of insurance services that would be cheaper. What to do? Pursue Persuitti, of course.

"He came back with two or three thoughtful ideas, which were superior to what we thought we could do," he said. Persuitti presented the client with options, so that the self-insured institutions didn't have to go to the market on their own.

"We were trying to get a program that consistently offers high value," said the captive manager. So instead of just offering seven insurance products, as was the case before the captive was set up, the new product offered all the coverages: general liability, auto, sexual misconduct, and directors' and officers' insurance.

In another instance, Persuitti executed a complex interdenominational catastrophe feasibility study for several self-insured programs.

Resident Managing Director, Practice Leader, Charitable and Social Enterprise Practice Alliance
Aon, Parsippany, N.J.
Matthew_Schneider@ars.aon.com

Awake at the Wheel

Large charities may look like traditional commercial businesses due to their size and their numbers of employees. But the comparison ends there, according to Matthew Schneider and his colleague, Gary Eppinger, both with Aon Risk Services. Schneider and Eppinger created a practice known as CASE--Charitable and Social Enterprise Practice Alliance--to serve the charitable industry.

A new client, a big charitable health organization, recently hired the Schneider/Eppinger team after working with the same brokerage firm for 15 years.

"We had been on autopilot and not very engaged," said the vice president and risk manager of the group, who was impressed with Schneider and Eppinger's knowledge from the start. "They were familiar with national fundraising and the language for different events."

The health organization, which sponsors marathons and long bike rikes, faces a list of safety issues every time it sponsors an event. The CASE team showed them what kinds of waivers they needed and how to craft them.

Schneider also reviewed the client organization's job descriptions and realized the client had problems with how they classified their sales employees. They had a higher risk profile than the organization realized--"a very high ratio," the risk manager said. So Schneider and the team reclassified the employees, lowering the organization's risk profile in the process. The previous broker, said the risk manager, "had been asleep at the wheel."

Arthur J. Gallagher
Area Senior Vice-President
Doral, Fla.

Beecher Carlson
Managing Director, Public Entity Practice Leader
Portland, Ore.

JZA Affinity
President
Bethesda, Md.

Arthur J. Gallagher
Area Senior Vice President
Orlando, Fla.