First in Time, First in Right: When Directors & Officers Liability Coverage Exhausts Before the Litigation Ends

Andrew Fastow pled guilty. Kenneth Lay and Jeffrey Skilling were convicted. Scores of other directors and officers who gathered around U.S. corporate conference tables in recent years have since become the subject of civil lawsuits or criminal indictments or both.The recent guilty verdict against Enron’s top two executives is but one more domino to fall in a series of corporate scandals that have ricocheted through America’s boardrooms and courtrooms during the past decade.

These same scandals were the catalyst behind the passage of The Public Company Accounting Reform And Investor Protection Act of 2002 — better known as Sarbanes-Oxley — Congress’s rapid response to what it perceived as an epidemic of corporate malfeasance, which has certainly added to boardroom pressures for corporations both large and small.