60 seconds with... Kevin Lazarus

As joint editor (with Julian Burling) of the soon-to-be launched Research Handbook on International Insurance Law and Regulation he hopes the book will be a significant addition to the material currently available.

The book, with its foreword by Lloyd’s CEO Richard Ward, takes a truly international look at the dynamic, disparate and complicated legal and regulatory environment.

Can you tell me a little bit about the book and its international significance?

While not exactly a snappy title, the Research Handbook on International Insurance Law and Regulation, being published by Edward Elgar Publishing in association with Lloyd’s, is intended as a significant contribution to the thinking on insurance law and regulation from a strong international perspective. It has 30 contributions dealing with the full range of insurance law and regulation topics and brings together 47 contributors from around the world, all leading academics or practitioners in their countries.

The insurance industry – and financial services generally – is going through a period of significant regulatory and legal change. Solvency II in Europe is obviously on everyone’s radar but it is hard to think of a jurisdiction not currently making changes to its insurance rules. The idea behind the book is that good regulation is in everyone’s interests but getting there means having access to the best thinking on the subject.

So is there a lack of good academic resource on insurance law and regulation?

We say in the book that academia, at least in the UK and a number of other countries, seems to lack much interest in insurance at the moment. In terms of core financial services, which is what London is famous for, there’s very little academic interest whatsoever. There is no university undergraduate course in the whole of the UK teaching insurance law. If you’re an academic it should be a genuinely interesting area – it’s intellectually complicated and challenging and it matters to people’s lives – and yet it does not seem to attract the interest it deserves.

There are some very good sources of material on law and regulation, including country specific textbooks. But there is not as much information as you might think, particularly if you are looking for something that brings everything together with an international focus. In a modest way, this book is intended to address that.

Tell me a bit about your job and how you got involved in this project...

I’m a solicitor in the legal and compliance team at Lloyd’s. The main area I’m responsible for is supporting the Performance Management Directorate and providing the legal advice around underwriting performance and a lot of the things to do with the market-facing side of Lloyd’s.

My background is in insurance and reinsurance. Before joining Lloyd’s about five years ago I was in private practice at Barlow Lloyd and Gilbert specialising in reinsurance litigation. That’s my day job.

The book came about after I did some lecturing at Queen Mary, University of London on insurance law and regulation. Professor Rosa Lastra, who is the general editor on this series of books and our main point of contact at Queen Mary, recommended that Julian Burling and I get involved with this book. She also feels there is a lack of academic interest in insurance law and regulation.

Who do you think the book will be relevant to?

Anyone looking for light holiday reading may want to look elsewhere. I don’t think this book is going to pose much of a threat to Harry Potter but we hope it will provide a useful resource for lawyers, regulators and policymakers as well as academics and students. It is intended to stretch the imagination of anyone who has an interest in insurance regulation and law.

Can you give an idea of some of the topics covered?

The range of topics is pretty wide. It includes an in-depth study on the rules relating to disclosure obligations in insurance contracts, focusing on the UK. It also looks at the way different jurisdictions facilitate finality in books of business and there is a chapter on the tort of bad faith in the US.

On the regulatory side there is a very good chapter by Louise Steinberg of Kings College London on the international organisations that have an interest in insurance globally, plus there is a chapter on ‘principles-based regulation’ focusing on the German and EU experience.

But there are also chapters on micro-insurance, takaful insurance, alternative risk transfer and electronic trading as well as chapters giving very good introductions to regulation in the EU, US, China and Brazil. There is an excellent short general introduction to insurance regulation and obviously we have included two chapters on Lloyd’s.

The book is diverse. But we assume whoever reads it will already be familiar with these issues in their own country and so we focus on the subjects with an international focus that we think are likely to be of additional interest.

Who are the contributors?

They are primarily lawyers or academics from around the world, many of them leading authorities in their home country. Professor Rob Merkin and Professor Malcolm Clarke will be familiar to many in the UK. Rob Merkin has written on reinsurance with Michael Mendelowitz of Norton Rose. Professor Oliver Brand and Professor Petra Pohlmann from Mannheim and Munster University respectively will also be well known to German lawyers.

But we have deliberately included an equal number of practising lawyers/regulators who bring with them a wealth of experience on how the rules are being applied on the ground.

Lloyd's has set the pace with Solvency II in particular – is this book a way of sharing best practice with those outside the market?

I’m not sure Lloyd’s would be so presumptuous. Julian Burling – previously Counsel at Lloyd’s – and I have both written chapters on Lloyd’s. Julian’s looks at the way Lloyd’s is licensed internationally and mine focuses on the Performance Management framework, which is a unique feature to Lloyd’s. Apart from that, Lloyd’s only gets a passing mention in a few of the other chapters.

It is important to say that the book is not about Lloyd’s and it certainly is not intended to present a Lloyd’s view of the world. Our role as editors was to identify the topics that we thought would be of most interest and then find the contributors internationally who could provide an interesting and rigorous contribution on the subject, bringing their varied local experience to add extra value.

You say the book aims to "stretch the imagination" of anyone interested in insurance law and regulation. How does it do this?

My experience is that most individuals involved in law and regulation are expert in their own countries’ rules or will have particular narrow areas of expertise. This book provides an opportunity to look at topics and country regimes a little more widely and to see different ways of thinking about subjects.

Although there is a lot of material out there it is not always that easy to access. While Japan is one of the largest insurance jurisdictions in the world, amazingly there is very little in English explaining how insurance law and regulation works there. This book includes a chapter providing exactly that, contributed by Professor Seiichi Ochiai, Shinichi Takahashi and Ryoko Takeda of Nishimura & Asahi in Tokyo.

Obviously, the challenge is to make sure the right topics are covered but that is where I think the Lloyd’s perspective helps. Lloyd’s has a unique position in the global insurance market with a strong interest in law and regulation. It is both a participant in the market, with insurance being underwritten internationally by the syndicates, and has a regulators’ perspective in terms of its oversight of the market.

 

Find out more about the Research Handbook on International Insurance Law and Regulation

 

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