Lara Degenhart Cassidy is Special Counsel with the firm's insurance coverage practice, where she helps individuals, groups, and companies tackle their most challenging insurance problems. Lara represents businesses and individuals in insurance-recovery negotiation, arbitration, and litigation over coverage for complex, high-value, multi-disciplinary commercial disputes and regulatory investigations. Her clients include well-known companies in the energy, chemical, retail, technology, manufacturing, construction, financial services, political law, and entertainment industries. Representative matters have included pursuing coverage for bet-the-company securities fraud litigation and regulatory investigations, media defamation claims arising out of politically charged social media posts, and wrongful death attributed to fouled groundwater. She is a creative problem-solver offering practical, strategic and business-oriented legal advice to her clients.

Lara has significant experience in pursuing insurance coverage for companies and their individual directors, officers, and managers under Directors & Officers (D&O) or Management Liability insurance policies. She has recovered hundreds of millions of dollars on behalf of her clients, including investigation, defense, response, and settlement costs for class-action securities litigations, shareholder derivative suits, formal and informal regulatory and administrative proceedings, and internal corporate investigations. She also has extensive experience with commercial general liability, property, employment practices liability, cyber liability and media liability policies, under which she has pursued coverage for a wide array of environmental claims, product liability suits, business interruption claims, wrongful termination suits, data breaches, defamation claims, and misleading advertising.

Lara has negotiated multiple insurance settlements under which the insurance companies fund the settlement of underlying claims, and pay her client’s investigation and defense costs in full. She also has negotiated cost-sharing agreements under which the insurer pays less than its full limits, when the immediacy of that approach appears in her client’s best interest.

From the outset of a claim that may implicate insurance coverage, Lara confers with her client’s defense counsel, its insurance brokers, and its often multiple insurance companies to develop and implement a cohesive defense and case-resolution strategy. This collaborative approach offers her clients and their insurance companies tangible insights into on-going cases, and permits insurance decisions to be made in an informed, efficient, timely and cost-effective manner.

When a negotiated resolution is not possible, Lara pursues coverage for her clients through mediation, arbitration, or litigation. She has extensive trial experience in both state and federal court, in domestic and international arbitrations, and in mediation. She notably led the appellate briefing in a groundbreaking Second Circuit decision on D&O insurance coverage issues, resulting in full coverage for her financial-services client.

Bar Admissions

Education
JD, University of South Carolina School of Law, Member, South Carolina Law Review, 1992

BS, Political Science, Southwestern University, cum laude, 1989

Diplôme des Etudes Françaises, Université de Bourgogne, 1989

• First Circuit Compels Insurer to Cover Directors and Officers Sued Jointly With Company Even Though Company Not Entitled to Coverage, Insurance Coverage Monitor
• What to Watch for in 2011: Second and Eleventh Circuits to Assess Coverage for Regulatory Investigations, Insurance Coverage Monitor
• Breach-of-Contract Claims: Why Errors-And-Omissions Professional Liability Policies Provide Coverage, Risk
• Frac Insurance: Policies Protect Against Fracturing Claims, The American Oil & Gas Reporter
• All-Sums-With-Stacking Allocation Boosts Insurance Recovery Under “One Giant ‘Uber Policy,’” Lexis.com
• Boiler and Machinery Insurance, New Appleman Library Edition Volume 5, Chapter 51, Commercial Property Insurance, Lexis.com
• Connecticut v. AEP Could Open Litigation Floodgates, Law360
• Navigating High Court's Options In Insurer Choice Of Law, Law360
• Supreme Court sinks yacht owner’s insurance counterclaim on choice-of-law grounds, PropertyCasualty360