Most large U.S. companies buy catastrophic liability insurance through a Bermuda Form, a unique policy with many features designed to protect the selling insurance company. Further, Bermuda Forms require arbitration in London or Bermuda, under English procedural law and modified New York substantive law. John Ellison, Richard Lewis and Catherine Lewis explore how best to incorporate the Bermuda Form into policy programs, as well as the unusual hurdles to recovering under the Bermuda Form. ----more---- Transcript: Intro: Hello, and welcome to Insured Success, a podcast brought to you by Reed Smith's insurance recovery lawyers from around the globe. In this podcast series, we explore trends, issues, and topics of interest affecting commercial policy holders. If you have any questions about the topics discussed in this podcast, please contact our speakers at insuredsuccess@reedsmith.com. We'll be happy to assist.  John: Hi, everybody, and welcome back to Insured Success. our continuing podcast series of important insurance topics. And today's topic is the Bermuda Form Part 1. This will be part of a two-part series we're going to do on this unique insurance product. And today's focus will be on the history behind the Bermuda Form and its development, and then some of the key policy terms. And then in our next episode, which will be coming out shortly, we will discuss how to perfect coverage under the Bermuda Form and issues relating to the unique dispute resolution provisions that are in the form. Today, our presenters are going to be my colleagues, Rich Lewis, who's a partner in the New York office, and Catherine Lewis, who is a senior associate in our London office, and I am John Ellison, a partner in the Philadelphia office. The three of us work together often on these Bermuda Form matters, as do many members, other members of our group. And due to our firm's geographic setup, depicted today by Catherine in London and Rich in New York, you'll learn that our firm is uniquely qualified and situated to handle these types of issues. So, Rich, I'm going to turn it over to you to give us some of the history and overview of the Bermuda Form. Rich.  Richard: Okay. Well, I don't know, obviously, our listeners' experience with coverage disputes, but policyholders in the 70s and 80s started buying a lot of liability insurance, and that had to do with developments in tort law in the United States. And if you've ever been involved in a case involving those policies, they typically were occurrence forms triggered by injury or damage in the policy period. And the coverage charts, as you got later in the 70s and through the 1980s looked like ski jumps. Companies were buying hundreds of millions of dollars of insurance in the late 70s and the early 80s. This also, as I'm old enough to remember, accelerated a lot in the early 80s because of the high interest rates that insurance companies could get. It was something called cash flow underwriting, where they would underwrite lots and lots of policies just to get the premiums in to invest the income. The bill came due in the mid-80s for a couple of reasons. One, there were a number of coverage decisions in the asbestos context that said that multiple policies could be triggered by the same injury to one person. So that meant that in an asbestos case, many, many years of coverage from the early 60s through the time when asbestos exclusions were more common in the early 80s could be triggered. The second reason was circled liabilities from environmental cases. And as a result, everybody was recovering under these policies that had been sold for not very much premium so that the carriers could get the money in the door. And what happened was the liability insurance market crashed. You literally could not buy liability insurance from any of the major players in 1985. So what happened was a number of Fortune 50 companies got together with Marsh & McLennan and they created a Bermuda form