Insurance Company Tells Law Firm They Won't Cover Blogs

Posted on March 28, 2007

Macworld reports that a law firm in New Jersey decided to hold off on setting up a blog after their insurance company told them the blog would not be covered under their malpractice insurance policy.

James Paone, a partner at Lomurro, Davison, Eastman and Munoz in Freehold, N.J., said that the firm's insurer - The Chubb Corp. - said several weeks ago that it would not add the blog to the existing policy. "We were in the process of beginning to set up a blog, having internal discussions about what areas of law would be the subjects," he said. "We wanted to cover the first base, which is [Chubb's] coverage. Our insurance carrier said [a blog] is not a risk they were interested in insuring. The entire discussion stopped."
Paone said his firm contacted Chubb to ask about insurance coverage in case someone tried to sue it over content in the blog. Now, the law firm is in the process of setting up a meeting with Chubb "so we can understand what their rationale is for saying they weren't interested in covering that kind of risk," Paone said.

Chubb is a big publicly traded insurer so it surprising they appear to find blogs to risky to cover. They do have an Internet liability section on their website. Lawyer and blogger Dennis Kennedy, who was quoted in the article, blogs about the issue here. Kennedy points out that lawyers have been using websites and phones for years and he doesn't think any new rules are needed for blogs. He also says, "My rule of thumb on these issues is to simply substitute the word 'telephone' for 'blog' and then see if there is any new issue raised by blogs that aren't raised by telephones."