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Book Review

By Helen Anne Boyer
February 24, 2005

It's exciting to find something entirely new and innovative. That's how I feel about the treatise by Richard Jacobs, Lorelie Masters and Paul Stanley, “Liability Insurance in International Arbitration ' The Bermuda Form.”

Thorn Rosenthal of New York's Cahill Gordon & Reindel firm was commissioned to draft a policy in the mid-1980s for Marsh & McLennan, to be used by policyholder-sponsored insurance companies that had been formed for the purpose of increasing capacity in the catastrophic excess casualty market. The policy form Rosenthal created became known as the Bermuda Form. It was the insurance industry's first occurrence-reported general liability form, combining elements of occurrence, accident and claims-made forms. The treatise sets forth in detail the legal and economic forces that stimulated the development of the occurrence-reported form, concluding:

The 'Bermuda Form' policy, as originally drafted and issued by ACE, is properly to be regarded as a balanced policy form, aiming to hold the ring fairly between the interests of policyholders and the interests of investors, as the same industrial corporations were in both roles. Id. at 14, section 1.19.

This treatise is the first comprehensive published analysis of the Bermuda Form, and therefore fills an important void in the literature. The authors have pioneered into an untrodden region.

Most coverage lawyers spend a fair amount of their time looking at forms that have been widely used and repeatedly construed by appellate courts. Often we find ourselves, as researchers and adversaries, plowing through a welter of opinions and commentary to select the most well-reasoned or best-stated interpretation of particular contract wordings, or discerning trends across multiple jurisdictions that have dealt with substantially similar texts.

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