On a Friday in late June, the Supreme Court, ruled in a 5 to 4 decision, same sex couples may now be legally married in all 50 states. Many people rejoiced while many people thought America was going to hell in a hand basket. Regardless of where you stand on the issue, the impact of this decision has huge ramifications for small and medium sized businesses specifically in the area of employment practices liability insurance or EPLI.
What do the Dallas Cowboys, New England Patriots, and New York Giants all have in common? Aside from being NFL teams and Super Bowl winners, they each have used a drone to film football practices, causing them to either be contacted or investigated by the FAA for violating federal airspace rules. The Washington Nationals received a similar “commendation” from the FAA after using a drone to take publicity photos during Spring Training.
Drone, or unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) have made a huge splash in the news over the last year. Amazon has discussed using them for local delivery, one landed on the White House lawn, as well as, their war time use in the Middle East. The commercial uses for drones are seem almost endless as people imagine how they can be utilized. Hollywood has won approval to use them for filming movies, farmers believe they can be used to check on crops, as well as administer fertilizer and insecticides more efficiently and utility companies want to use them to check power lines. Insurance companies are planning to use drones in disaster response situations.
I work with several builders in the Dallas area of differing sizes. Some remodel homes, some build new and custom homes, while others finish out commercial office space. Regardless of the differences in the work they do, they all share several things in common when it comes to their commercial insurance.
Before the data breaches at Anthem, Home Depot, Neiman Marcus, and Target, there was Sony. In 2011, the Sony Playstation Network was hacked resulting in the theft of customer data. Sony pushed to have their insurer, Zurich, cover the losses resulting from the data breach, but Zurich denied the claim. Sony had a general liability policy, but not a cyber liability policy with Zurich.
Last week, I wrote a post about Dallas area homeowners receiving notices from the mortgage companies regarding their monthly mortgage payments are increasing. This is due to their home insurance rate increasing, or an increase in property taxes, or some combination of both (see https://wiseinsurancegroup.com/home-insurance-property-taxes-and-escrow-accounts/). It turns out they aren’t the only ones receiving these notes!
I’ve been thinking a lot about ice cream lately, specifically Blue Bell ice cream. They’ve been in the news a lot since listeria bacteria was discovered in some of their ice cream products. Officials believe that Blue Bell ice cream contaminated with listeria is responsible for the deaths of 3 people in Kansas in the past year.
Anthem, the second largest health insurance company in the US, announced last week it had been the victim of a massive data breach. The good news appears to be no medical records or credit card data was compromised. The bad news was the names, birth dates, and Social Security numbers of up to 80 million people were compromised which could lead to an even bigger problem than had they simply taken credit card data.
Last fall, Dallas was set to open a horse park near the Great Trinity Forest in southeast Dallas. The opening was delayed partly due to
On November 14 of last year, I wrote a blog post on why small businesses should care about net neutrality (see http://50.87.248.161/~wiseinsu/why-small-businesses-should-care-about-net-neutrality/). I wanted to revisit it because of a Wall Street Journal article posted on Monday, January 5th which stated Republicans in Congress are working on plans to fight the FCC’s rules on net neutrality. The FCC had to revisit the work they were doing on net neutrality after President Obama made a speech calling for a free and open internet available to all.
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