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Changes in the VCAP Liability Coverage Market

May 11, 2022 Podcast
Upside

Over the past few years, there's been a dramatic rise in premiums in the venture capital liability insurance market and a steady increase in claims being submitted under those policies. We're also seeing a lot of discussion about coverage for cyber security threats and SPAC transactions. Let's talk about all of that and more.

Erica Villanueva: All right. I’m Erica Villanueva, a partner in Farella Braun + Martel's Insurance Recovery Group, and I'm excited today to be talking about current trends in the venture capital liability insurance market, and because brokers are on the front lines and are the first to see trends in this area, I've invited Dan Berry to join me. Dan is a senior vice president and leader of the Private Equity and Venture Capital Group at Woodruff Sawyer & Company. Woodruff Sawyer is an insurance broker and a leader in insurance services risk management. Dan is an expert in management liability risks, including D&O and, as is relevant here today, venture capital. Dan has worked directly with private equity and venture capital firms and their portfolio companies for many years.

And in addition to leading the group, he works closely with his clients to provide guidance on risk mitigation and risk management solutions. Dan negotiates directly with insurance carriers who customize and place insurance programs that meet the risk transfer needs of his clients. Prior to joining Woodruff Sawyer, Dan was a sergeant in the United States Marine Corps and is a graduate of UC Davis. Dan, welcome to Upside.

Dan Berry: Thank you, Erica.

Erica Villanueva: So again, as I said, the reason I wanted to invite you is because brokers are really on the front lines and they see the trends in the market way before attorneys do. And we're talking today about venture capital liability insurance. Why don't we start off with a quick overview from your perspective on exactly what VCAP liability insurance is and what it covers?

Dan Berry: Yeah. So, I think the important thing to keep in mind is we tend to segregate venture capital and private equity, but for this particular conversation, they're synonymous. It's a general partner liability program. There are probably 15 or 20 carriers out there in the US, in particular, and a smattering through the Lloyds of London market that will write this type of business. What I would say is everybody gets there differently on their contractual language as you well know, Erica, but the bone structures are fairly prescribed at this point.

Most folks or most carriers will have about four insuring agreements. One being fiduciary liability type claims, D&O at the fund or firm level, they'll have their professional services or E&O coverage. They'll also carry something referred to as outside director liability or ODL, which for all intents and purposes, is excess D&O coverage over and above the coverage available and indemnification available at the portfolio company level. As opposed to being sued in your capacity as a fiduciary to the funder firm, you're being sued as a board member of a portfolio company. Again, D&O coverage grant, it's an excess position to protect the net worth of those folks that are doing that job.

And then the final one is employment practices liability. In today's day and age, we don't have to spend as much time on it as we used to sadly, but it's sexual harassment, wrongful termination, and discrimination torts. The thing to keep in mind with respect to those particular claims the policy form is both first and third party in nature. So, first party being an employee of the firm suing another employee for one of those issues. Third party being some other third-party business invitee, a portfolio company employee, a co-investor, et cetera.

Folks are buying one single limit of liability on an annualized basis to set an umbrella over top of all of those ensuring agreements for any combination of claims that could come up in a 12-month period. I always like to remind people, if you buy 10 or 15 or 20 million dollars of this stuff, you don't have 20 million dollars per silo per year. You've got 20 million in total for any number of claims that may arise in that time period.

Erica Villanueva: No, that's right. That's a great overview, Dan. Good reminder about the EPL coverage, which I agree, not as active as it used to be in terms of claims, but in this me-too era, you can never forget about it. What would you say are the top three trends or biggest issues that you're seeing right now amongst your VC and PE clients?

Dan Berry: I think the claims activity is greater than it ever has been. I think the frequency, I wouldn't say the frequency of activity has had a wild spike, but it continues to slowly rise over time on the frequency side of things. The biggest change that we've seen is the actual claim severity. The expense associated with both defending and settling any given piece of litigation, which I'll come back to, that coincides, often, with an under-buying of overall limits because folks are used to historical issues going away for much cheaper than they will today.

I think lastly, and I'm sure we'll talk about this more, the premium increase over time has significantly increased its fervor from any given insurance carrier where I think most clients if you've been a CFO or a general counsel of a venture firm for a decade, with the exception of those folks that have had some significant claim's activity, you've probably seen a flat to completely decreasing premium. Maybe five, 10% year over year, despite maybe your total assets under management growing by 20 or 30 or 40%. In some cases, even more.

And so, I think the premium increase, there's a little bit of sticker shock there because you've got some thinning in the market that's driving maybe some under-buying of limits year over year. And then you layer on top of that the claim's activity, which, Erica, if you want to dig in, I'm happy to talk a little bit more about.

Erica Villanueva: Yeah, let's do that. Let's talk about each one of those things, but I think you've already highlighted for us how closely related they are, but let's dig in on each one of those. And let's start with the premium increases because, in some ways, that's the easiest thing to discuss and address. As a form of financial lines, management liability, and professional liability coverage, I think it's impossible to just start any discussion about any of those coverages without talking about the hard insurance market that we've had over the past few years and the exponential premium increases that we've seen. This has certainly been the case with public company D&O. But when, and how did that branch out into this insurance market in private equity and venture capital, and where is that trend headed?

Dan Berry: Yeah. I think you could probably trace it back to about three years ago. We had probably 25 or 30 markets that were actively writing this type of cover. If you followed this market for any period of time over the last couple of decades, you'll know that's a significant increase in the number of carriers that were available to place any given client with. And part of that growth was based on if you were a moderately sized insurance company and you wanted to write the Banes and the Apollos, the bigger private equity firms, or the bigger buyout shops of the world, you had to in some way offset that exposure because those folks tend to get sued more often by going into earlier stage venture capital. And that's all the way from a 200 to a 500 million dollar fund family to a 30 or 40 billion dollar fund family.

And so, over time, you saw a significant decrease in the overall expense associated with this. So I was talking to a client the other day who, even with three or four years of increase, is paying less now for 40 billion dollars of insurance than they paid for their primary 10 in 2002. We already had a significant decrease in the overall market just based off of the competition coming in. It worked great for a significant period of time, but with the increase in claims activity and frankly, the increase in expense associated with settlement, the carriers have started to figure out something that used to go away for $175,000 or $150,000, now all in with settlement and defense is costing a million bucks. That's part of it. Insurance companies want to insure for extraordinarily high severity but extraordinarily low frequency. That's their ideal sweet spot.

But when you have a scenario like this, where over time deductibles have been so low for venture and private equity in particular, or venture and earlier stage private equity, in particular, you get into a scenario where nuisance claims themselves begin to hit the policy form. And so, the carriers are dying by a thousand cuts in some respects with smaller claims, 1, 2, 3, 4 million dollar claims. And then, you have overlaying on top of that, the significant increase in some of those higher severity claims. So, just anecdotally, Woodruff Sawyer, if you look at our 30 or 40-year track record doing this type of stuff, the largest single claim up until five or eight years ago that we could point to for one client under one issue was around 25 million bucks. And that's with defense and settlement, and that was a huge outlier for a significant amount of time.

I probably have seven or eight current claims that are north of 40 million dollars in just defense for a venture firm, which is insane. You just don't see things like that. And so, you have those two dynamics taking place, and then you have this plethora of carriers that have been writing this stuff and helping drive rate down, but maybe only five of the 26 have been doing it for a couple of decades. And so, if you're a new entrant into the market as a carrier, and you've written somewhere in the neighborhood of a million dollars of premium, and you get a seven or 10 million dollar claim that falls into your lap, you're done.

Your pencils down the finance team at your shop has taken away your privileges to do anything else, and now you no longer are writing venture capital management liability. And so, we had this scenario where those things collided, and then you had significant claims activity that shrunk the overall pool of folks that could consistently come in and help drive rates down. So we went from 26 carriers to 14, and of those 14, maybe there are five to seven that I would consider the best case primary, first position carrier.

Erica Villanueva: Yeah. That's a really good summary of what we've seen over the past few years, and I've been in the trenches with you on some of it, on some of that claims activity. So, let's talk a little bit about the claims activity. In my mind, there are three big areas where I see claims activity. One, there are always going to be employment disputes. And for employees who had claims to, and potentially lost carried interest points as a result of being terminated, there's a huge financial incentive to bring the claim, and the claim can be very high value compared to your garden variety employment claim. So, I still see a steady stream of those in the system.

Then there are the myriad types of litigation that could be spawned by a struggling or a failed portfolio company. The VC or PE backers will be viewed as a deep pocket, and I see plaintiff lawyers getting more and more creative about finding theories to bring in those firms as defendants. And in particular, in the case of an IPO exit and the initial stock drop securities case, finding ways to bring the VC investors into those cases.

You saw this not too long ago, for example, in the Slack IPO securities case, which named not only the company, and the individual board members, but the VC firms themselves. Does that summary there capture the major kinds of claims activity? Any other trends that I didn't hit on that you might be seeing?

Dan Berry: That's pretty good. Most of what we see continues to be, particularly on the severity front, to your point, Erica, around partner on partner litigation, where one partner is exited and for whatever reason, feel like they've been impacted by the management team that continued. So, we do see a lot of that. That tends to be the most severe type claim. We do see a lot of the IPO litigation, and in my experience, those have a hard time sticking for an extended period of time. Usually, there's some dismissal, but it takes some money to get out of that. That's not universally true, but it happens quite often that way.

I think the biggest one that is driving the most amount of loss at this point, at least in our portfolio, is private company litigation. So, think moderate to highly valued private company, 10 or 15 years ago, would've been forced to go public. But for whatever reason, they're able to stay private longer. And there's some kind of issue, whether it's a biotech firm that had a drug development candidate that failed, or it's a technology company that clearly didn't execute on the tech, it didn't do everything they thought it would.

And you have this spectacular failure, or even a winding down would trigger it. And what we see and what has been most severe there is you have a company that is no longer solvent or potentially doesn't have enough to fulfill its indemnification obligation to its board of directors. And then they've bought limits based on private company assumptions rather than buying it more like an operating company would at the public company level. So a 2 billion dollar market cap operating company publicly would buy 40 million dollars of insurance, maybe 30 million of insurance, depending on how much stock is in the float.

Where a private company, I will tell you, and I know you've seen it, Erica. You'll pick some of these policies up, and this company's worth two and a half-billion dollars, and they're buying two and a half-million of D&O insurance. And it's almost the worst-case scenario for private folks because you're being incentivized to grow. They actually want you to not have so much cash on the table. And so, you have a hyper valuation with a very lean cash runway and a very small amount of overall D&O insurance.

And when you get into a piece of litigation and that all evaporates, those directors and officers, which are usually venture folks, your firm is on the hook. You have to pay for your settlement and your defense somehow, and your policy is what will respond to that. And so, those are the ones that traditionally you wouldn't see outside director claims. Really, maybe one a year would be a couple of million bucks. Now, the vast majority of high severity claims we have if they're not partner on partner litigation, it's an outside director issue.

Erica Villanueva: Yeah. That's a great point, Dan. And it is directly connected to what you noted when you started off this whole discussion, that the fact that they stay private longer, there's a direct line connection between that fact and the severity of the claim and the damages because the amount that's been invested without going public. So, it's kind of a double whammy and then the portfolio company is buying insurance like it's a small lean mean private company startup when really, it has an exposure that's more like a massively capitalized public company, which it has a similar profile to that.

So, that leads directly to the discussion of under-buying of limits because something's got to give. In the case you've just described, the portfolio company has way under-bought its limits. And so, realistically, for that ODL exposure, that outside director liability exposure for that struggling or failed portfolio company, the VCAP insurance is going to have to pick up the slack and may not have sufficient limits.

How do VC firms find themselves in this situation where they've under-bought the limits, and what benchmarks have you and your team at Woodruff developed to ensure that firms aren't under-buying? Is it simply correlated assets under management? Are there other factors? Tell us a little bit of the secret sauce.

Dan Berry: On the limit side for the individual venture firms, if you're an earlier stage investing team, you've got $200 million in assets under management, maybe that's across two fund families, potentially three, depending on how things have shaken out. You'll see most of those folks buy somewhere in the neighborhood of call it $5 million of total general partner liability. A lot of that is always based off, Erica, folks looking for peer data. I hate peer data personally. I think you've heard my bent on that a couple of times. I've never met anybody, particularly in this industry class, that wants to be in the bottom quartile of their peer group.

And so naturally, and in some cases, erroneously, that just gets inflated over a period of time. And so what we try to do is look at the actual exposure of the portfolio of the client that we have in question. Assets under management, I think, matter, but not as much as I think historically folks have weighted it. So, for example, if you're a 300 million dollar growth equity firm and you're going to do five to six buyout deals a year, and then a couple of 40-percenters, that's going to lead me to suggest that you buy more limit than an early-stage venture firm would be doing that's writing 75 to 100 checks under a couple of million bucks. Just because it takes so long for those assets to season. And in most cases, you're going to have the WhatsApps of the world, I understand that, but it takes a long time for those kind of seed to A round stage companies to develop and mature to a point where there's some there, there, and there's something worth spending $1,600 an hour on a litigator for.

And so, I think I focus less these days on the total assets under management and more about the makeup of the overall portfolio. And I think everybody has just seen a tremendous amount of growth in their portfolio, whether you're that series A 100 million dollar fund family, or you're a 40 or 50 billion dollar fund family. So, I think it's more about looking at the age of the assets you have, how many fund families do you have deployed? How long have they been in the saddle?

Look at the overall makeup of the portfolio itself. What's in there? Are you doing a lot of crypto investing? You got folks looking at de-SPAC transactions. You have teams that are looking at direct listings and taking all of that into account. So, I would say it's more of an art than it is a science at this point. Historically, folks would just say, well, I'll buy a million dollars for every $100 million of committed capital I have, and that's about the most erroneous way to buy the stuff. So, I think you got to spend some real time getting to know the client and understanding the portfolio.

Erica Villanueva: You heard it here first from the expert. A lot of wisdom in those remarks, Dan. Let's switch gears and talk about a few risks that VC and PE firms might be missing. Your clients work with a lot of confidential data. A lot. There are portfolio companies, LPs, investors. Does VCAP coverage extend to those kind of risks like data breaches, ransomware, other cybersecurity threats?

Dan Berry: Yeah. This is the least favorite thing for any client to talk about these days. Particularly given ransomware is something that in the last 12 months alone, has just become incredibly prevalent in the overall venture and private equity market. Historically, maybe you could see one a year where you would have a ransomware attack that ended up getting paid out. In the last six or seven months, I think I've noticed seven or eight of those.

A couple of them have been fairly public that anybody can Google and read about, but most of them are handled privately. And so, I think cyber liability, which is where you're headed with the ransomware data breaches and those types of cyber security threats is something in venture, in particular, in my opinion, has been under-bought. I think in very large private equity because of the SEC's focus and cyber security controls that the firm has in place. And those LPs pressing on their investors to make sure they have that.

You'll see 10, 15 million dollar cyber towers on very large buyout shops. But even moderately sized venture firms, I'm talking 10, 15 billion in assets under management, you won't see anything close to that. And I think some of it is just the nature of the business and folks being more comfortable with risk on the venture side of the house than they might be in an institutionalized private equity firm.

I think some of it has been historically around exposure for up until three or four years ago you would struggle to find a real cyber claim that a venture firm would care about. Maybe they lost a hundred thousand bucks all in, and they'd have to figure it out, but times have changed, and they've changed very, very rapidly. And cyber is one of those areas that isn't as structured as what a general partner liability contract is currently.

So, there's not this prescribed bone structure that we talked about. You can pay a lot of money for something that covers nothing. You can pay a moderate amount of money for something that's tailored to your unique risk profile. And so, I think the VCAP, or the GPL, or general partner liability, you would expect it to respond in some form or fashion on the E&O front for a breach of professional services. Whether that's, I trusted you with something and, I expect you to make me whole.

But pure cyber, that first- and third-party liability, you're not going to get anywhere other than a cyber policy. So first-party liability being the cost associated that the firm itself has to pay. So, think mitigation costs and cost of corrections and all that good stuff. And then the third-party piece being your customer or client that's been harmed and then venture and private equity, it's your portfolio company or your LPs. And so, I've seen a significant uptick on the interest in cyber reliability in the last year.  I feel like ventures the world where you have to show me it happened to somebody first before I'll believe you. And so, I think there's been a significant uptick on that stuff because of that, and I think we'll only continue to see that grow. I think it'll end up being as important to these folks as general partner liability is today.

Erica Villanueva: That's good. Good advice for your clients. I definitely echo that. Switching gears a bit. No financial lines insurance discussion these days would be complete without touching on SPACs and placing insurance coverage for those entities. In the VC context, the firm might assume that a sponsor entity will automatically get covered under their own policy. Is that the case?

Dan Berry: Unequivocally not the case. Unfortunately for our clients. The SPAC boom has been interesting, particularly over the last two years. And I think with the plethora of venture firms and even middle-market buyout shops getting in and sponsoring those types of transactions, the carriers have started taking a real look at their policy at the firm or fund level. And if they're in trouble, and I work a lot with insurance carriers, I love and respect them very much, but it's not my job to lead them down the path of righteousness.

And the reality is the insurance coverage at the venture and private equity level is so broad with respect to what constitutes an insured entity that if you raised a SPAC two years ago, you got free coverage for sponsor exposure in most circumstances, not because it was intended to be granted by the carrier, but because that language is just so broad that if a broker knew what they were doing and had an Erica with them to help, we were turning that in as a claim and advocating for the client to have it covered.

And so, I think last year with 300 plus, or at some point, midyear, I lost count how many SPACs went out, but hundreds of SPACs being listed, I think carriers started coming back and they were like, "Hey, Dan, do you think the sponsors covered under this policy?" And you're like, "Yeah, I'm definitely going to turn this in as a claim." So they have now, I think, around renewal time, if you raise this SPAC, you're presented with two choices more often than not.

And the first one is affirmative SPAC sponsor coverage under your policy, and they will charge for it, or an affirmative exclusion of SPAC sponsor exposure, and there will be no charge for that SPAC exposure because they're completely excluding it. I've seen folks handle it a myriad of ways, Erica. Some clients, if you have a good relationship with the SPAC itself, sometimes you can get co-defendant language for the sponsor vehicle under the SPAC's D&O policy, which is a great spot if it's available to you in the market.

I think part of the problem a lot of folks ran into last year was there was just such a saturation of deal flow out there that carriers started getting pretty stingy on the SPAC D&O side on what they were able or wanted to offer. And so, it used to be, hey, we need sponsor, co-defendant language for the sponsor on this particular SPAC D&O placement and was, yeah, of course, no big deal. And then we started getting a lot of no's towards the end of the year as they became more choosy.

And so, I like to tell folks if you've got more than one or two of these things, don't hang your hat on co-defendant language in the SPAC's D&O itself. For a couple of reasons and the biggest one being those folks are usually pretty thinly capitalized. They don't have a lot of cash on hand. And so, in my opinion, they tend to buy less limit than they should. So they're buying five million bucks of public company D&O insurance, maybe 10, a couple of fifteens here and there, but you're sharing that. The firm is sharing that with the board of directors of the SPAC itself. So, if possible, my recommendation is always to add SPAC sponsor liability to the general partner product that the firm has if you're doing more than one of these.

Erica Villanueva: In particular, I would say because the post-IPO D&O, public company D&O insurance is probably going to have a much higher retention than the GP insurance product. Which is another issue that was outside the scope of today. We couldn't even get into changes in retentions, but I know they're getting higher for venture capital and private equity, and they're already sky-high for public company D&O.

So, Dan, I would like to close selfishly by asking you a few questions that I get from my own clients all the time. I just would love to hear your answers to them. Who right now are the biggest insurance companies, the biggest players writing VCAP liability, and which ones do you think are doing it the best?

Dan Berry: The interesting thing about the venture capital and private equity product is it's just been around so long. So, you have a storied amount of firms that do the primary layer of insurance. And for the listeners, your first level of insurance, whether you're buying two and a half million with a total of five, or you're buying five million with a total of 40, that first carrier in your stack dictates the terms and conditions for the entirety of the policy. And so, everybody north of them, if your broker's done it appropriately, should just say, I'll follow the guidance of the primary carrier. It should be a follow form policy is how it's referred to.

That really hasn't changed up all that much, Erica. Those carriers are carriers that have had a significant well of premium over the last couple of decades to be able to weather the current storm that we have on the claim side of things. And so, it's Chubb, Arch, occasionally you'll still see Access in the mix, CV Starr and CNA. Those are the folks you're spending the most time with on the primary side.

Most of them have the ability to work with counsel and the broker to write manuscript policy forms that can be bespoke to the particular client. Those are the, I would say, the primary players. And then there's a slew of excess capacity players that on occasion can also do primary out there. The market's still fairly robust, but CNA and Starr at this point, and Starr has been in it for 10 years now or so, but CNA and Starr are probably the two latest entries into that arena, but they've both been around for a really long time.

Erica Villanueva: So, that sort of leads into my next question, which is whether you thought there were any newer entrants, maybe last five years or less, that have impressed you that you think are up and coming, but maybe not quite there yet in the same sort of category with your Starr, and your Chubb, and CNA.

Dan Berry: Yeah. CNA is really the newest one. I would say they have historically up until about two years ago, focused on the mid to upper tier of a tower on a buyout shop. And I'm talking very large buyout is my historic understanding of their book of business. In the last two years, I think, they made some hires that had some significant experience in venture capital, both on the claims and the underwriting side. So they built a team there that has worked at some of those other carriers that I mentioned, and they've brought that institutional knowledge with them to CNA.

And so, what we've seen from CNA in the last couple of years is a high degree of focus on middle to large venture capital and growth equity slash, or mid-market to lower mid-market private equity. Calling them an up and comer would seem wrong because most of the folks in the saddle there have been doing it for 10 or 15 years, but they're a new entrant into the market that I think is on par with respect to policy form, to somebody like a Starr or a Chubb.

Erica Villanueva: And then last question for you. What is up with the trends? Are you seeing them like I have in claims handling, and folks on the claims handling side really cracking down and pushing back on choice of counsel, on rates, on management of the claims? Is that something that you're seeing as well? Because five or seven years ago, when I would work on claims venture capital, these clients, of course, they want the counel that they want for their claims period.

They expect those counsel to be paid the rates that those counsel charge. I would argue that the policy language entitles the insureds to that coverage. Five or seven years ago, you got that coverage. Now, you get relentless pushback, slice and dice. I feel like I'm doing an employment practices liability claim for a retail insured. Sorry, insider insurance nerd joke there.

Dan Berry: Yep.

Erica Villanueva: What is up with that, Dan? Is that a real thing or am I imagining it?

Dan Berry: No. It's painful. You and I have been through that together on a couple of different clients. I feel like our claims team at this point spends more time messing around with bill audits than they do actually talking about coverage and what should be covered and what isn't covered under the policy. Most of the time, they're like, well, and so it feels a little bit like working with the federal government to get an insurance product to pay at times, given the expense associated.

I think, Erica, a lot of it just comes back to a couple of things. The first thing is I think that there is not the same level because of the labor market being what it is today - there's not the same level of experience at the individual insurance carriers on their in-house claims team. It used to be, you would have a claims professional in the saddle at somewhere like Chubb, or CNA, or Starr, or pick the carrier, that was only focused on general partner liability issues and had been doing that job for 10-ish years.

Now, I think, with so much capital going around and enticing people to move, and move up in their org structure or move away from their current org. What you're seeing, in my opinion, is not the same quality of institutional knowledge on the claims side of the house, the carrier. And so, they naturally as a carrier, if you don't have that, what do you do? You lean on coverage counsel, and coverage counsel is incentivized to represent their client and make sure they get the best outcome, not necessarily pay the claim per the guidelines of the policy form.

And so, there's a lot of pressure there. And then, Erica, you and I both know, nine years ago or five years ago even, we weren't passing litigator bills back and forth at $1,620 an hour. I think you heard me on a call, or you and I on a call together trying to sell to the carrier that it was completely reasonable to have a paralegal charging $850. That's just something that's changed significantly.

Erica Villanueva: He was probably a fine paralegal.

Dan Berry: Unbelievable. Yeah. Best paralegal I've ever seen. That's part of the issue. Part of the issue is the sheer expense is double or triple what it used to be. And so, I think carriers are really pressing on that. And I think it all goes back to the deductibles not being right-sized for the particular client and them assuming a rate of return on the policy they wrote and then finding out that even nuisance claims are going to end up hitting their book. And so, they can try to write more business or they can try to pay less claims. And so, you're always going to have that pressure, but I think it's more so just because of sheer expense.

Erica Villanueva: Well, luckily, your clients have you and the team at Woodruff to push back on the carriers when they don't want to pay $850 an hour for a paralegal, and I'm always happy to help too, in that regard.

Dan Berry: Yeah. You're always helpful in that regard, Erica. I always like doing those calls, not on Zoom. I prefer to do them verbally because I don't know that with a straight face sometimes, you can say that $850 is reasonable. But, you know.

Erica Villanueva: Look, the bottom line is that with all the changes that we're seeing in the VCAP market, it's a really good time to stay on top of these developments. Thank you, Dan, for going over this with our listeners. I really appreciate it, and it was great spending time with you today.

Dan Berry: Thank you. I was happy to do it. It was a lot of fun. Appreciate it, Erica.

Erica Villanueva: All right, everyone. That's it for today. I'm Erica Villanueva with my guest, Dan Berry. You've been listening to Upside, brought to you by the private equity and venture capital team at Farella Braun + Martel. If you have any questions about what we talked about today or suggestions for topics you would like for us to cover, please email us at [email protected]. Thanks for joining us. Until next time. Take care.

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Developments in the law have increased the potential liability that companies could face under the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA), but fortunately for policyholders, Illinois case law has also solidified coverage for BIPA...

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Publication

When Can an Insurer Pursue a Malpractice Claim Against Defense Counsel Retained for an Insured? (Part Two)

By Jalen M. Brown, Kristin Davis, Shanti Eagle, Peter J. Georgiton, and J. Mark Hart Part 1 of our two-part article addressed the circumstances in which an insurer can directly pursue malpractice claims against...

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Publication

Reporting Dispute Claims Within Closely Held Wineries

Many wineries operate as closely held companies, meaning they’re owned by an individual or small group of shareholders, who are often members of the same family. Disputes regarding ownership interests can arise, particularly when directors...

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Publication

Regulatory Changes Underway To Address Dwindling California Property Insurance Market

We keep hearing about how difficult it is for our clients to get property insurance these days, both for homes and businesses in Northern California’s wildfire-prone areas. Which, of course, is most of Northern...

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