COZEN O'CONNOR | The Confidence to Proceed

Overview

Cozen O’Connor’s subrogation and recovery attorneys handle more substantial property damage and other first-party subrogation claims than any other law firm in the United States, operating from our 24 offices situated strategically in major population centers across the country, as well as internationally in London and Toronto. These claims typically arise from casualties such as fires, explosions, structural collapses, boiler, machinery and equipment failures, gas and water leaks, and a variety of nature-induced losses such as wildfires, windstorms and floods. Our attorneys will coordinate our investigation and evaluation with your claims personnel and forensic consultants to enhance recognition of viable subrogation opportunities. Our early involvement will succeed in maximizing recoveries while simultaneously reducing expenses, by allowing our attorneys to perform, as part of our contingent fee based services, investigative activities that otherwise typically are outsourced to an hourly paid adjuster or expert.

In a typical year, Cozen O’Connor’s Subrogation and Recovery Department receives in excess of 7,000 losses, each over $100,000.00. These claims range from multi-million dollar industrial catastrophes to more conventional losses involving commercial and personal lines structures. Our subsidiary companies, National Subrogation Services and Maritime Subrogation Services, receive in excess of 10,000 assignments annually involving moderate sized losses below the threshold of Cozen O’Connor’s large loss subrogation programs. With this unparalleled portfolio of subrogation assignments, Cozen O’Connor is uniquely situated to identify repetitive failure scenarios, product liability design flaws, and other important subrogation opportunities on behalf of our national and international clientele. As a consequence, we recover hundreds of millions of dollars on behalf of the insurance industry in a typical calendar year, and our benchmarking performance, measured by variety of subrogation metrics, continually surpasses the highest reported industry averages. We represent primary insurers, commercial entities with significant self-insured retentions, third-party administrators, managing general agents, brokers, agents, and independent adjustment companies. We have represented many of our clients for decades.

As part of our services, Cozen O’Connor regularly provides private client training to ensure that our clients remain current concerning all claims, legal and technical developments in the subrogation arena. Our educational programs are supported by Cozen O’Connor’s proprietary subrogation and recovery electronic library, which contains over twenty 50-state jurisdiction comparative charts, and over 250 papers and reference materials authored by our firm’s attorneys. We are an approved CE and CLE provider, so that claims professionals employed by our clients can satisfy their licensing requirements through our subrogation educational programs.

In addition to our detailed, narrative reporting, Cozen O’Connor offers a web based, real time subrogation claims database, constructed on an iVOS platform, which provides our clients with complete access to a wide range of fields of information for all pending and closed subrogation claims that we handle, including status, work stage, projected and/or actual recovery amounts and dates, loss descriptions, responsible parties, and all pertinent financial data, including actual and projected recovery amounts and associated fees and costs. We provide our clients with monthly and quarterly electronic spreadsheets, which many of our clients use as management reports to track estimated recoveries and actual results.

In addition to our core competencies in handling property and allied first-party lines, many of our attorneys have extensive experience in other specialized insurance products, including energy/ petrochemical, construction defects/failures, product liability claims (for which we have numerous, highly focused task forces), fidelity/surety, environmental, maritime (ocean and inland marine), and CAT/NAT losses. Cozen O’Connor practices throughout all 51 jurisdictions in the U.S., including the District of Columbia, and we have a full complement of subrogation attorneys in the U.K. and Canada. We have corresponding counsel relationships with highly respected commercial litigation firms throughout Europe, Latin America and Asia, and currently have subrogation claims pending in more than 50 jurisdictions spanning the globe. Most of our partnering foreign local counsel partners work with us on a shared contingent fee basis, thus significantly reducing hourly counsel fees to our clients for pursuing claims outside the United States, the United Kingdom and Canada.

Cozen O’Connor maintains numerous electronic databases which we regularly update. This includes our expert database with more than 10,000 listed consultants, enabling us to identify specialized experts in fire investigation, mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, structure/civil engineering, chemistry, metallurgy and other important specialized scientific disciplines. We have a comprehensive product liability database which we utilize to marshal evidence pertaining to repetitive product failures or systemic design defects, including our national/international product liability task forces dedicated to the handling of CSST claims, Chinese drywall claims, halide lamp failures, and appliance failures, and other loss scenarios.

As noted, Cozen O’Connor has two subsidiary companies, National Subrogation Services and Maritime Subrogation Services, with over 35 experienced recovery analysts available to handle moderate and smaller losses below the threshold of Cozen O’Connor’s large loss subrogation programs. Cozen O’Connor thus is equipped to handle any size loss, in any line of business, anywhere in the United States or internationally. For additional information, or to request an evaluation of any pending or prospective claims, please contact Elliott R. Feldman or Kevin J. Hughes at the numbers/e-mail addresses referenced above.