Risking It All: Getting Insurance Coverage For Intentional Acts

Originally published in Hospitality Lawyer's Risk Management Newsletter (February 2009)

For the Risk Manager of a hospitality company, the worst nightmare is a loss that – despite the risk modeling, despite the careful planning of risk transfers, and despite having placed a high-quality set of insurance programs – falls into some unforeseen gap in coverage. Every time the Risk Manager thinks he or she has anticipated all reasonably foreseeable losses, another scenario raises its head and forces everybody back to a planning mode. The only way to anticipate and prevent gaps is planning, planning and more planning. Indeed, the Risk Manager's most significant function within the corporation is to plan for disaster, then insure against it.