Caroline Brizzolara

Caroline Brizzolara served as Partner with the Firm for 10 years and is now Of Counsel. She continues to focus on insurance coverage, reinsurance litigation and arbitration, and high-stakes insurance defense matters.

Caroline has extensive experience in resolving property and casualty coverage disputes under primary, excess, and umbrella policies. Her expertise includes the successful resolution of claims by and against insolvent insurers in receivership and liquidation, life insurance coverage disputes, and insurance defense matters. She has also represented major domestic, British, and Bermuda insurance companies in reinsurance disputes under excess of loss and quota share treaties, facultative certificates, and casualty clash contracts. She has provided guidance to domestic clients on insurance regulatory and compliance issues in and outside the state of New Jersey.

Her goal in all matters is to provide clients with clear, reasoned advice, which, regardless of the complexity of the issues involved, meets her clients’ legal and business needs, in as timely and cost-effective a manner as possible.

Caroline’s clients include:

• Conservators in Texas and New York, in connection with their resolution of multimillion dollar asbestos bodily injury, property damage, surety bond, construction defect and reinsurance claims;
• A domestic reinsurer, in connection with its defense and successful settlement of $14 million in asbestos bodily injury claims presented under two facultative certificates;
• A domestic insurance company, in connection with its investigation of hundreds of millions in contingent business interruption losses arising out of the March 2011 tsunami in Japan;
• Officers of a Bermuda reinsurance company underwriting finite risk reinsurance, in connection with various U.S. government investigations;
• Life insurance companies in Texas and Oklahoma, in connection with their defense of wrongful denial of benefits claims and their responses to regulatory investigations and audits conducted by the New Jersey Department of Banking and Insurance and the New Jersey Department of Labor; and,
• A domestic insurance pool manager and its insurance company affiliates, in court and arbitration proceedings to obtain reinsurance for more than $108 million in aviation losses arising out of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks at the World Trade Center.

Caroline has served on the Firm’s Hiring Committee and administered its summer associate programs from 2002 to 2004. She has presented seminars on alternate dispute resolution and ethics in arbitration, and is an active member of ARIAS U.S., a nonprofit corporation that promotes improvement of the insurance and reinsurance arbitration process.