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...Category: New Laws/Court Decisions
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 […]
Read more...Privacy Notices No Longer Required (in some cases)
On November 28, 2016, the Georgia Insurance Commissioner’s Office issued a Bulletin, 16-EX-2, that clarified the duty of insurance agencies in Georgia to give annual notices to their customers of their data sharing and privacy policies. In that Bulletin, the Insurance Commissioner’s Office confirmed that it would adopt a change that had been made to […]
Read more...FLSA Issues That All Agencies Should Be Aware Of
It has been over a week since a federal District Court Judge issued an injunction staying the implementation of the new overtime rule (click here for more information on the injunction), and it does not appear that the U.S. Department of Labor is going to try to have the injunction overturned on appeal, at least […]
Read more...Court Stays Implementation of New Overtime Rule
Yesterday, a judge on the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas entered a preliminary injunction staying the enforcement of the new overtime rule that was to take effect on December 1, 2016. (Click here for an explanation of the rule.) The judge found that rule to be unlawful because it imposed a minimum […]
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