Insurance Recovery

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Miller Nash's insurance recovery team helps business clients maximize the value of their insurance policies through litigation, negotiation, and behind-the-scenes advice. We have extensive experience handling both “first-party” coverage claims, including business interruption due to the COVID-19 pandemic, theft, and fire damage; and “third-party” coverage, including long-tail environmental contamination and Superfund claims, construction defect, bodily injury, directors' and officers' liability, cyber, professional liability, and products liability.

Our goal is to maximize each client's insurance recovery in the most cost-effective manner possible. To achieve this goal, our attorneys draw not only on our well of experience in insurance and bad-faith law, but also on our firm's attorneys steeped and deeply experienced in areas like bankruptcy, construction, and real estate. When you hire the Miller Nash insurance-recovery team you get the benefit of the firm’s deep bench and broad experience in solving complex business problems.

Our team members have taken insurance cases to trial in federal and state courts, and handled appeals in multiple jurisdictions, recovering more than a billion dollars for our clients in the past decade alone. Here are some of our notable recent successes:

We represented a port district in defense and indemnity claims against the client’s primary insurer arising out of a multi-site environmental cleanup, resulting in negotiation of an eight-figure settlement.
We litigated marine hull-damage insurance claim, resulting in settlement for full value.
We secured full reimbursement of the costs to defend and settle timber-trespass litigation, in a coverage case that went to appeal and resulted in a published decision on issues of first impression under Oregon law, Bighorn Logging v Truck Ins. Exchange, 437 P.3d 287 (2019).
We assisted in recovering six-ﬁgure mitigation costs from an insurance company when a downtown Seattle hotel experienced a sewer-line rupture.

Our creative thinking also extends to the sometimes high cost of litigation. Understanding the impact that a large loss coupled with a denial of coverage from the insurer can have on cash flow, we have pioneered the use of alternative fee arrangements in appropriate situations.

In addition to having litigated cases that established new precedent in multiple areas of insurance law, members of our insurance recovery team are also considered thought leaders in the field. We are active in the American Bar Association’s Insurance Coverage Litigation Committee, RIMS, and other insurance-focused legal and business groups.