A recent Bulletin from the Insurance Commissioner’s Office has caused me to reconsider a blog post from almost five years ago. In the Bulletin, the Insurance Commissioner reminded brokers who handle excess and surplus lines policies that they cannot collect sums for those policies in excess of the “premiums and charges for insurance specified by the […]
Read more...Category: New Laws/Court Decisions
Insurance Certificates and Opinion Letters
My last post about insurance certificates was almost two years ago. At that time, the consensus seemed to be that issues regarding them were declining as all the interested parties became more familiar with Georgia’s law and regulations. However, I learned from a recent participant in the Free Legal Service program that I run for members of […]
Read more...Is An Agency Required To Obtain A License When Its Agent Must Obtain a Non-Resident License?
My last blog post dealt with the question of when an insurance agent must obtain a non-resident license if they are placing insurance coverage for a risk located in another state. This post will explore the related question of whether the agent’s insurance agency must also obtain a license from the insurance department of the other […]
Read more...When Are You Required to Obtain a Non-Resident License?
Unlike most summers, this one has been very busy for my law practice. I have been involved in the sale of three of my insurance agency clients in the past couple of months, which is one reason I haven’t been as diligent as I should have in making blog posts. This post concerns an issue that has arisen in each […]
Read more...Uninsured Motorist Coverage – Traps for the Unwary
In May of this year, the Georgia Court of Appeals issued two decisions involving uninsured motorist coverage that all agents should be aware of, as both of them create potential E&O exposure. In the first case, the Court of Appeals held that the insureds had uninsured motorist coverage in the amount of their liability coverage, […]
Read more...Raffles – Can They Be Used to Encourage Referrals? (Updated)
A recent caller to the Free Legal Service program that I run for the members of the Independent Insurance Agents of Georgia asked the above question. His agency was thinking about running a promotion that gave a raffle ticket for each referral made to the agency during a specified period of time. The winner would receive […]
Read more...Recording Customer Telephone Calls – A Good Idea But Is It Legal?
In a recent post on his blog, Steve Anderson recommended that insurance agents take advantage of the new telecommunications technology that makes it relatively easy to record all incoming and outgoing telephone calls. He suggested that making such recordings could become the primary means by which an agency documents its contact with its customers and […]
Read more...What Rights Do Customers Have to Information in Agency Files?
The above question was recently asked of me by a caller to the Free Legal Service program that I run for the members of the Independent Insurance Agents of Georgia. In particular, the caller wanted to know if they could refuse to provide loss runs to a former customer whose policy had been cancelled for non-payment of premium. This customer […]
Read more...Payment of Referral Fees – Additional Considerations
In October of last year, I wrote a post that summarized my opinion on the question of when and how an insurance agent may pay a fee to an unlicensed person for the referral of a potential customer to the agent by that person. That post was written from the perspective of whether and when the […]
Read more...Privacy Notices May Still Be Required Under Georgia Law
In early December, I wrote a post about a change made to the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (the “GLBA”) by Congress at the end of 2015, which created an exemption under that Act from its requirement that notices of an insurance agency’s data sharing and privacy policies be given to its customers on an annual basis. In preparing for a […]
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