With hurricane season underway and wildfires ravaging parts of California, understanding how to go about an insurance claim after a natural disaster is as important as ever. In part one of a two-part series on the topic, Matt Weaver, Chris Kuleba and Jessica Gopiao take listeners through many of the issues commonly faced by property owners immediately following a loss or potential loss and offer important advice for anyone in such a situation. ----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.  Matt: All right, welcome back, everyone, to the Insured Success Podcast. My name's Matt Weaver. I'm a partner here at Reed Smith in the insurance recovery practice in Miami. I'm joined here by two of my favorite people, my partner, Chris Kuleba, who also sits with me in the Miami office, and my colleague, Jessica Gopiao, who splits her time between California and South Florida. It's hurricane season. It's also, unfortunately, wildfire season. We're here to talk today about some practical things and some important pieces of advice for anyone who's facing a loss or a potential loss due to any one of these events. Jess, Chris, you want to say anything more about who you are?  Chris: Sure, Matt. Thanks, and thank you for everybody for tuning in. My name is Chris Kuleba. As Matt mentioned, I'm a partner at Reed Smith in our insurance recovery group. I'm based in Miami. I've been doing insurance recovery work essentially my entire career. I was barred in 2013, so I'm going on 11 years now. I'll turn it over to Jess.  Jessica: Hello, everyone. My name is Jessica Gopiao. I am a senior associate and member of the Reed Smith's Insurance Recovery Group. As Matt had mentioned, I split time between South Florida and Southern California. Back in June, I chatted with Rich Lewis and John Ellison about navigating insurance claims after natural disasters. And with hurricane season being amongst us and the record-breaking wildfire season, we are now going to talk more about that.  Matt: So I think the goal here for everyone is to focus on what we, in our experience, have seen as key issues in these cases and these claims that drive outcomes. A lot of things can happen in the course of an insurance claim. Some of it is important. Some of it, candidly, is not. But we want to talk a little bit about things from our perspective that tend to really matter and tend to push these claims in one direction or the other. So Chris, you want to start us off?  Chris: Sure. And as Matt mentioned, this is by no means an exhaustive list. What we'd like to do is sort of take you through some of the sort of big picture, significant driver issues, starting from the beginning of a loss through the claims process and then through a process that's called appraisal, which is a alternative dispute resolution process found in most property insurance policies, though the nature and the scope of those provisions can vary based on the text of the policy. But first, if it's okay with everybody, I'd like to start with some causation issues. And by that, I mean when an insured or a property, I should say, suffers a loss, what is the relevant cause of that loss for purposes of determining coverage? In the instance of a hurricane or a wildfire, that is often very obvious, at least with respect to some of the immediate damage. But you'll find, as many of us have, that when submitting a claim, an insurance company will often point to damage, maybe that preexisted a hurricane or preexisted a fire in the case of a partial loss and seek to find ways within the policy to deny coverage for all or part of a loss.