Photograph by Dennis J. Wall
WIND, which stands in for Windstorm Insurance Network, blew into Walt Disney World for its 20th Annual Conference recently. WIND has grown from an initial membership of some 350 people into a roll call of about 1,300. They come from 36 States, and from other countries including Singapore, France, and Germany.
About 1,200 people attended the Annual Conference in 2019. WIND members and the people who tend to attend the Annual Conference as well, are all professionals representing policyholder and insurance company sides of property insurance disputes, in basic and simple terms.
The sessions I attended this year generally proved the WIND format, which is not unique to WIND but works everywhere it is used to present insurance issues as far as I can see: A panel of four presenters, for example, would have one policyholder lawyer, one policyholder public adjuster, one insurance company representative or independent adjuster, and one defense attorney to present points of view.
The panel presenting Commercial Policies and Claims followed this model. Like every other session I attended, the panel that presented this topic emphasized the long-standing truth that the insurance policy is the starting point for the answer to every insurance coverage question.
Whether presenters said that "the insurance policy is king," or compared purchasing a policy to going to the store where what you come out with depends on what you get, the central idea behind every issue is always what the policy says.
Besides expressing eternal truths, as it were, the panelists at WIND raised cutting-edge questions in property insurance for all participants to consider. An example of current questions is whether there is coverage under property insurance policies for experts' assistance to policyholders in adjusting or presenting claims under their policies? The suggestion was raised that perhaps good arguments in favor of coverage for that assistance would be available under coverage for Adjustment Expenses, whatever the coverage might be called in a given policy.
Another suggestion was that perhaps there is such coverage available under Extra Expense coverage. Whatever the source of coverage there might be for that particular expense, the idea is new and current and will come as no surprise to the attendees of this year's 20th Anniversary WIND Annual Conference.
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