Description

The English courts describe insurance brokers as ‘servants of the market’. Undeniably, the role that is played by the brokers in the insurance market is crucial for all the parties involved in an insurance/reinsurance contract. Hence, the duty of care owed by a broker to those parties becomes fundamentally important and it should attract great attention. As the cases have illustrated, a broker’s breach of the duty of care may cause disastrous consequences, not only for the assured but also for their own business and their professional indemnity insurers. The existence of the duty of care that is owned by a broker to his clients is well-established in English law. Recent developments have demonstrated that the assured may bring an action against the brokers before bringing an action against the insurer who denied liability. Moreover, in such cases, the assessment of liability may be made on the balance of probabilities rather than on the loss of chance basis. Further, in such claims, one should not lose sight of the defences that are available to the brokers. With such a complex picture, it is necessary to have a close look at the role of the brokers in the insurance market, the international character of their activities and especially delegated authority, the consequences of a breach of their duty of care, and defences that may be brought by the broker in an action against him. All of these issues will be analysed in this talk with a historical look at the developments of the law in this area and the implications of some of the most recent cases decided by the English courts.

About The Speaker

Özlem Gürses has a law degree and an LLM from the University of Istanbul and LLM (Maritime Law), with distinction, and PhD degrees from the University of Southampton. Özlem formerly worked as a Lecturer at the University of East Anglia and as a Senior Lecturer at the University of Southampton. She is currently Reader in Insurance and Commercial Law at the Dickson Poon School of Law, King’s College London, where she teaches insurance and reinsurance law to undergraduate and post-graduate students. Her interests include maritime and insurance law and she is an author, among other things, of The Insurance of Commercial Risks: Law and Practice 5th ed (Sweet and Maxwell, 2016), Marine Insurance Law 2nd ed (Routledge, 2016), and Reinsuring Clauses (Informa, 2010), her doctoral thesis. Özlem is a member of the Presidential Council, and the secretary of the Reinsurance Working Party of the International Insurance Law Association/Association Internationale de Droit des Assurances (AIDA).

Who Should Attend

Lawyers, in-house counsel, and legal officers and claims handlers working in the maritime, insurance and reinsurance industry, and P & I Clubs.