Best Practices for Placing Cutting Edge "Cyber" Insurance: Policyholder, Insurer and Broker Perspectives

With more than 30 years of trial experience, Kathy focuses on complex commercial litigation, class actions, cybersecurity, and mass torts. Her class action experience involves defense of companies targeted with consumer product class claims spanning a wide range of consumer products. She has also defended large developers in commercial disputes and construction cases, and has defended chemical companies and commercial developers in environmental lawsuits alleging lost profits and/or lost business opportunity due to environmental contamination in soil and groundwater. Her toxic tort practice has consisted of defending large multinational corporations in mass tort, product liability, and putative class action litigation with hundreds of plaintiffs seeking recovery for injuries allegedly arising from exposure to air or water contamination or from chemical, pharmaceutical, or health products.

Kathy has served as national trial counsel in litigation involving asbestos, breast implants, drinking water, and groundwater, as well as regional counsel in lead paint and l-tryptophan cases. Due to her extensive trial experience, Kathy is often retained in bet-the-company cases, is substituted into complex cases headed toward trial, asked to try cases when settlement efforts have failed, or brought in to prepare the punitive damages defense for mass tort cases. She represents one of the largest retail companies in the world on its tort litigation in California, including personal injury cases. Kathy manages a large caseload for this client and is very effective in using her skills as a certified mediator to select key cases for early resolution in order save the client the fees and costs of litigation. When necessary, she tries the cases that cannot be favorably settled.

Kathy’s trial abilities have garnered her membership in the American Board of Trial Advocates (ABOTA) at the Advocate level, and she was invited to be a sustaining member of the Product Liability Advisory Council (PLAC). She is also a certified mediator, ADR neutral, a settlement conference officer for the San Francisco Superior Court, and an Early Neutral Evaluator for the Northern District Court. Kathy uses her skills as a certified mediator to encourage clients to participate in ADR for disputes most likely to benefit from early mediation, reducing the stress and expenses usually incurred during protracted litigation.

She has been a member of the American Bar Association’s Tort Trial and Insurance Practice (TIPS) Section leadership group for 25 years, serving presently on TIPS Council, the governing body of TIPS. She has received two ABA Leadership in Action Awards for Outstanding Contribution to TIPS, one for her work as Chair of Disaster Task Force, 2011-2012, and the second for her work as Chair of the Cybersecurity Task force, from 2014-2017, resulting in the creation of a new General Committee for TIPS, which launched in 2017 with Kathy serving as its first Chair.

Presently, she continues to teach Trial Advocacy at Stanford University Law School and the University of San Francisco School of Law where she has taught for the past 30 years. Kathy also volunteers at the Lafayette Moraga Youth Association as a basketball coach and National Charity League.

Before going into private practice, Kathy served as an Assistant District Attorney in San Francisco, where she tried more than 150 criminal cases to verdict and was recognized with the Distinguished Service Award. Kathy also worked as a staff lawyer for the Office of Opinions & Review, Federal Communication Commission in Washington, DC, and prior to joining Ropers Majeski was a partner at two AmLaw 100 law firms.

Tom Ricketts is the Cyber Practice Leader and co-leads the Property and Casualty Department within the Professional Services practice in New York, providing risk management and insurance advice for all Property and Casualty lines of coverage to the division's clients; including placing cyber insurance for more than 120 law firms from AmLaw 10 to AmLaw 200. Tom is on the faculty of Thomson Reuters Westlaw and of the UCLA Cybersecurity Certificate Extension program.

Tom started his 30-year insurance career with Willis Faber & Dumas Ltd. in Sheffield England and subsequently worked for Sedgwick in London and New York, before joining Aon in New York.

In 1991 Tom founded the Sedgwick Global Telecommunications practice, which became the leading provider of risk management and insurance advice to the global telecommunications and media sector. He consulted with the World Bank and EBRD on developing-nation communications projects as well as advising start-ups such as Global Crossing, Iridium and FLAG (“Fiber-Optic Link Around the Globe” now part of Reliance Globalcom).

Tom has also been an innovator and entrepreneur; among his innovations in the industry, he created and placed the very first open-market Technology E&O program. He was recognized by Risk & Insurance Magazine as a Power Broker for his work in the Telecommunications sector (2006) and in the Construction sector (2011).

Tom has a Master's Degree in English Literature from the University of St. Andrews, Scotland.

Josh is a partner in the Philadelphia office. He advises companies, including members of the insurance and insurtech industries, on a wide array of data privacy and security compliance issues under such laws as CCPA/CPRA, HIPAA, New York’s DFS Cyber Regulations and the SHIELD Act, BIPA, and GDPR. He also advises clients on emerging threat and risk vectors, development and implementation of privacy and security programs, big data licensing, and data transfers. He also assists companies with national and international cybersecurity incident response matters.

In addition, Josh advises insurance carriers on media and cyber liability coverage at trial and appellate levels throughout the country, including winning two cases involving matters of first impression before the Third Circuit, and litigating one of the first cyber coverage matters in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. His matters involve all manners of complex risk involving cyberattacks, data breaches, ransomware, and business email compromises (BECs), as well as media and privacy claims and litigation on behalf of media entities, film productions, Top 40 music, reality television programming, newspaper liability, software and gaming developers, banks, and casinos.

He regularly writes and lectures on cybersecurity and data privacy and coverage issues. He has guest-lectured on cyber law and insurance at Temple University Fox School of Business and Rutgers Law School, and has been quoted in The Wall Street Journal, Law360, Business Insurance, and Compliance Week. He also served as an editor for a working group of X9, an ANSI-accredited standards developing organization, to develop a universal standard for data protection and data breach notification in the financial services industry.

Currently, Josh is a Vice Chair of the ABA TIPS Cybersecurity and Data Privacy Committee, and is the founding Chair of the Cybersecurity and Data Privacy Committee for the Pennsylvania Bar Association. He is also a founding member of The Oxford & Cambridge Society of Philadelphia, and has been selected by Cambridge in America and the University of Cambridge as an official alumnus contact for the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.

Ms. Sutton concentrates her practice in the areas of insurance recovery, risk management counseling, and emerging cybersecurity, privacy, and data protection-related issues, including security incident planning and breach response, and directors and officers liability-related issues. In addition to successfully pursuing her clients’ insurance recoveries in disputed insurance claims settings, and assisting clients in recovering hundreds of millions in insurance assets, Ms. Sutton counsels clients proactively on complex insurance placement and risk management issues. She advises clients in assessing their potential cybersecurity, privacy, and management liability risks, among myriad other forms of corporate risk, and in securing appropriate insurance to cover those risks. Ms. Sutton provides clients with strategic advice on ways in which they can best maximize the value of their current and historic insurance assets. She also has extensive experience conducting insurance due diligence in connection with mergers and acquisitions and in drafting contractual risk transfer provisions, including insurance and indemnity clauses.

For over two decades, Ms. Sutton has successfully represented clients in connection with a broad spectrum of insurance claims and issues arising under almost every kind of business insurance policy, and has extensive experience in the selection, drafting, negotiation, and placement of Cybersecurity, Privacy and Data Protection (Cyber), Directors & Officers (D&O), Management Liability, Errors and Omissions (E&O), Technology E&O, Commercial General Liability (CGL), Commercial Property, Business Interruption, Professional Liability, Employment Practices Liability, Fidelity, Fiduciary, Crime, Political Risk, Environmental, Terrorism, and many other types of insurance coverage. Her experience includes all phases of coverage litigation through trial and appeal, and international arbitrations.

A recognized national authority in cybersecurity, privacy, and data protection, insurance recovery, and directors and officers liability issues, Ms. Sutton frequently lectures on these subjects, and provides interviews to leading industry publications and mainstream publications, such as The New York Times and The Washington Post. She currently serves as Vice-Chair for the American Bar Association’s Tort and Insurance Practice Section Cybersecurity and Data Privacy General Committee. She has spoken on a variety of insurance coverage and litigation practice issues for The Risk and Insurance Management Society (RIMS), Strafford, Law Seminars International, the American Bar Association (ABA), and various local bar association and other professional programs. She is delighted to have coauthored the cybersecurity guide for executives, Navigating the Digital Age: The Definitive Cybersecurity Guide For Directors and Officers.