Summary
- Maintain due diligence throughout the expert engagement.
- Consider using experts in a privileged capacity.
- Avoid exclusion of your experts.
Unlike most specialized areas of litigation, insurance coverage litigation often encounters the use of experts in a vast variety of substantive areas—different first-party insurance policies may require expertise about different types of causation and losses, and the subject matter of third-party coverage disputes often depends on the issues in the underlying litigation, which could vary from medical malpractice to chemical pollution. The author recently spoke at an ABA panel on how to navigate the thorny issues in the use of experts in insurance coverage litigation and has a few practical tips to offer.
In sum, the use of experts in coverage litigation shares a lot of commonalities with that in other types of litigation, but it also has its own unique issues of which practitioners need to be mindful.