Keeping it Legal: Future Challenges in Insurance and the Role of Law and Regulation

We are very pleased to introduce our speakers and panellists

Peter MacDonald Eggers QC is a barrister practising at 7 King’s Bench Walk in London specialising in all aspects of commercial law, with a particular emphasis on insurance and reinsurance. Peter practised as a solicitor before being called to the Bar by the Middle Temple in 1999. He was appointed a Queen’s Counsel in 2011. He is co-author of Good Faith and Insurance Contracts and Carver on Charterparties, author of Deceit: The Lie of the Law and The Vitiation of Contractual Consent, and a Contributing Editor of Chitty on Contracts. He teaches at University College London and King’s College London. Peter is a Deputy Judge of the High Court and sits as an arbitrator. In 2019, he was named Insurance Silk of the Year at the Chambers Bar Awards. Peter has most recently appeared as counsel in Enemalta v Standard Club Asia, Axis Corporate Capital v ABSA Group, Aegean Baltic Bank v Renzlor Shipping, Generali Italia v Pelagic Fisheries and Aspen Underwriting v Credit Europe. Peter is currently Chair of BILA.”

Prof. Dr. Rosa María Lastra is the Sir John Lubbock Chair in Banking Law at the Centre for Commercial Law Studies, Queen Mary University of London. She is a member of the Monetary Committee of the International Law Association (MOCOMILA), the European Shadow Financial Regulatory Committee, the European Banking Institute, the European Law Institute, the International Insolvency Institute, the Sovereign Debt Scoping Forum of the Financial Markets Law Committee (FMLC), the Financial Markets Group of the London School of Economics and P.R.I.M.E. She has served as a consultant to the International Monetary Fund, the European Central Bank, the World Bank, the United Nations (UNCTAD), the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the Asian Development Bank and the UK House of Lords. She is a member of two expert panels of the European Parliament supporting the ECON Committee: the Monetary Panel and the Banking Union (Resolution) Panel. She is co-director of the Sovereign Debt Forum (a joint initiative with Georgetown University). Prior to coming to London she taught in Columbia University in the City of New York and worked at the International Monetary Fund in Washington D.C. She studied at Salamanca University, Valladolid University, Madrid University, London School of Economics and Political Science and Harvard Law School. She has written extensively in her fields of expertise, including the following authored and edited (or co-edited) books: Research Handbook on Law and Ethics in Banking and Finance (Oxford University Press, 2019), Research Handbook on Central Banking (Elgar, 2018), International Financial and Monetary Law (Oxford University Press, 2015), Sovereign Debt Management (Oxford University Press, 2014), The Rule of Law in Monetary Affairs (Cambridge University Press, 2014), International Law in Financial Regulation and Monetary Affairs, (Oxford University Press, 2012), Cross-Border Bank Insolvency (Oxford University Press, 2011), Legal Foundations of International Monetary Stability (Oxford University Press, 2006), Central Banking and Banking Regulation (Financial Markets Group of the London School of Economics, 1996). In 2019-2020 she has been principal investigator in a research project on the Legal and Economic Conceptions of Money funded by ESRC (Economic and Social Research Council) under the umbrella of Rebuilding Macroeconomics (RM) Finance Hub at NIESR (National Institute of Economic and Social Research).

Kirsten Mitchell-Wallace is the Head of Portfolio Risk Management at Lloyd’s, the world’s leading insurance market. She is responsible for setting and leading the strategy of the Exposure Management, Aggregation, Outwards Reinsurance and Pricing, Portfolio Management & Research teams. This activity spans multiple areas from developing new accumulation scenarios for natural and man-made perils to building best practice frameworks for cat management and pricing, as well as setting standards and overseeing technical portfolio risk management in the Lloyd’s market. In her previous role as Regional Cat Manager for Europe, Middle East and Africa at SCOR, she was responsible for leading cat teams based in Zurich and Paris. Before this, she was Head of Cat Pricing and Methodology responsible for coordinating the development of SCOR’s own view of risk. She built on almost five years’ experience as a Senior Catastrophe Risk Analyst in Willis and two in model development for RMS, as well as two years as a risk management consultant.  She is one of the authors of “Natural catastrophe risk management and modelling: a practitioner’s guide”.

Dr Trevor Maynard is head of Innovation at Lloyd’s.   Trevor’s team launched the Lloyd’s Lab (www.lloydslab.com) in 2018, the technology incubator at the heart of the Lloyd’s market.  The lab has helped many insurtechs grow to commercial success over the past two years.  The Innovation team is also responsible for product development related thought leadership (see Risk Reports – Lloyd’s (lloyds.com)) and works closely with the Product Innovation Facility a collection of 25 Managing agents at Lloyd’s committed to collaborative product development to meet the changing needs of its global customers.  Prior to this Trevor was responsible for the Lloyd’s exposure management process including stochastic modelling of natural catastrophe risks and the Lloyd’s Realistic Disaster Scenario process.  Trevor has a Phd in Statistics from the London School of Economics and Political Science and a Masters degree in pure Mathematics from the University of Warwick.  He is a Fellow of the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries in the UK.

Dr Franziska Arnold-Dwyer is the Director of the Insurance Law LLM Programme at the Centre for Commercial Law Studies (CCLS), Queen Mary University of London.  She is also the Deputy Director of the CCLS Insurance, Shipping and Aviation Law Institute.  Prior to returning to Academia, Franziska practised law in the Litigation & Dispute Resolution Department at Clifford Chance LLP.  Franziska is the author of ‘Insurable Interest and the Law’ (Routledge, 2021), one of the editors of O’Neill and Woloniecki ‘The Law of Reinsurance’ (Sweet & Maxwell, 5th ed., 2019), and has published several papers on insurance law.  She is the deputy editor of the BILA Journal, regularly speaks at insurance law events and has had educational engagements at law firms. She has assisted the Law Commission and the Scottish Law Commission with their insurable interest reform project. She is a contributing author to LexisNexis and Westlaw on insurance law.

Professor Daniel Schwarcz is an award-winning teacher and scholar. His research focuses on a broad range of issues in insurance law and regulation, spanning systemic risk, regulatory federalism, consumer protection, employer-sponsored health insurance, and insurance coverage litigation. In 2017, the American Law Institute awarded Schwarcz its highly selective Young Scholars Medal, which recognizes the scholarship of one or two outstanding early-career law professors whose work has the potential to influence improvements in the law. He has also been awarded the Liberty Mutual Prize, which is given annually for the most outstanding article on property and casualty insurance law.  Schwarcz’s scholarship has been published in a wide range of leading law reviews and journals, such as the University of Chicago Law Review, Virginia Law Review, and the Journal of Empirical Legal Studies. He is also a co-author of the leading insurance law casebook in the country, Insurance Law and Regulation (7th edition), which has been used as the principal text in courses on insurance law in more than 100 American law schools. Media outlets such as the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and National Public Radio have covered Schwarcz’s scholarship. He regularly testifies to U.S. Congressional committees on insurance matters, and he has served as an expert witness in a wide range of insurance disputes. From 2007 to 2014, he served as a consumer representative at the National Association of Insurance Commissioners.  Schwarcz teaches courses on contract law, insurance law, the regulation of financial institutions, commercial law, health care regulation and finance, and judicial opinion writing. He has twice received teaching awards at the Law School, in 2008 and 2012.Schwarcz earned his A.B., magna cum laude, from Amherst College and his J.D., magna cum laude, from Harvard Law School. While in law school, he was an articles editor for the Harvard Law Review and a John M. Olin Fellow in Law and Economics. After law school, he clerked for Judge Sandra Lynch of the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit and practiced at the law firm Ropes & Gray, where he worked mainly on insurance law matters. He subsequently spent two years as a Climenko Fellow and Lecturer on Law at Harvard Law School.

Christoper Jones Following completion of a Masters degree in business law, Chris started his career in the insurance industry in 2000 and is currently the IUA’s Director of Legal and Market Services. This entails overall responsibility for the association’s underwriting and claims committee output across all non-life insurance and reinsurance classes of insurance. Chris also works with IUA member company compliance practitioners on meeting their regulatory and legislative requirements and is a qualified Company Secretary.

Professor Rick Swedloff serves as the Vice Dean and as a Professor of Law at Rutgers University. He writes in the areas of insurance law, regulation, and access to the liability system. In recent years, he has written a series of articles on insurance regulation in the age of insuretech and the role of insurance as a regulator of the practice of law at large law firms. Professor Swedloff teaches courses on civil procedure, remedies, insurance, and law and economics. Prior to joining the Rutgers faculty, Professor Swedloff practiced as a litigation associate with Dechert LLP in Philadelphia, where he specialized in complex commercial, tort, and insurance cases. Before entering private practice, he served as a clerk for Judge Walter K. Stapleton of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit and Judge Roderick R. McKelvie of the U.S. District Court for the District of Delaware.

Professor Green was appointed as Law Commissioner for Commercial and Common law on 01 January 2020. She was previously Professor of Private Law at the University of Bristol.  Prior to that, she was Professor of the Law of Obligations at the University of Oxford, and, before that, a lecturer at the University of Birmingham from 2001 – 2010.  Before embarking on her academic career, she was a software consultant at Accenture. Professor Green has written about a variety of issues including virtual currencies, blockchain issues surrounding intermediated securities, smart contracts, sale of goods law as applicable to digitised assets, and wage theft.

Ashley Prebble is head of the Financial Institutions Group in London and co-head of the Global Insurance Sector Group. He specialises in corporate and regulatory insurance, including startups, IPOs, mergers and acquisitions, reorganisations, distribution agreements and all compliance and regulatory matters. He has experience of advising insurers, reinsurers and intermediaries in both the Lloyd’s and London market.  Ashley leads the insurtech initiative and has spoken at various global conferences.  Ashley is a member of the LMG working group on government affairs and a member of the LMG’s Brexit taskforce.

Dr Miriam Goldby is Professor of Shipping, Insurance and Commercial Law at the Centre for Commercial Law Studies, Queen Mary University of London, Director of the Centre’s Insurance, Shipping and Aviation Law Institute and Director of its LLM in International Shipping Law. She is a member of the Comité Maritime International (CMI) Standing Committee on Carriage of Goods, vice-chair of the International Chamber of Commerce UK (ICC UK)’s Commercial Law and Practice Committee. She is the author of Electronic Documents in Maritime Trade: Law and Practice (OUP), the second edition of which was published in 2019 and has published extensively in the fields of shipping, insurance and financial law. She has received research funding from the British Academy, the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and Lloyd’s of London and has contributed to research undertaken by the Bank of England on InsurTech and the Law Commission on Anti-Money Laundering. She is a member of the Centre for Maritime Law at the National University of Singapore and joined the centre as a visiting senior research fellow in 2019. She is on a part-time secondment to the Law Commission to work on the Commission’s Electronic Trade Documents project between November 2020 and January 2022.