Insurance Coverage Issues For Wage and Hour Class Actions webinar 2018

Wage and Hour class actions put employers at great financial peril.  They are easily filed, expensive to defend against, and expose the employer to hefty fines and penalties on top of statutory damages.  Worse, insurance companies tend to deny or severely limit coverage for them.

For as often as such class actions are filed (one estimate puts it at several a day in California), case law is surprisingly quiet on the issue of insurance coverage for such actions.  Some insurance policies may well bar coverage of these lawsuits.  But many insurance policies quite arguably do not.  It therefore pays to scrutinize the language of a policy, as it may mean the difference between coverage for both defense and indemnity of class action claims or no coverage at all.  This webinar will help employers navigate the language in an insurance policy and identify potential rights to coverage.  

This potential is particularly available in California, where so-called “wage and hour” class actions often include various claims under the California Labor Code beyond claims for unpaid minimum wage or overtime.  Under generally-accepted insurance principles, coverage of  those other claims may compel coverage of even non-covered claims.  And even then, a host of issues exist regarding the coverage of those other claims – What constitutes covered “loss”?  Are statutory penalties necessarily uninsurable?  How are defense costs apportioned between covered and non-covered claims, and especially under a policy sublimit offering defense coverage of the otherwise non-covered claims?  

This webinar will address these and other issues through a review of general insurance coverage principles, common policy provisions and exclusions, and the scant case law existing in this area.

Faculty
David A. Shaneyfelt has represented numerous corporate policyholders in disputes with insurance companies over coverage of wage and hour class actions.  He is a former shareholder with the New York-based law firm of Anderson Kill, and served as a Trial Attorney with the U.S. Department of Justice, Civil Division, in Washington, D.C.  He has thirty years’ experience in litigating complex civil matters in state and Federal courts across the country, where he represents numerous private and public entities in a wide-variety of insurance coverage disputes against insurance companies.  He now practices with the Alvarez Firm in Calabasas, California.