Environmental Risk Mitigation Group

Environmental Risk Services

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Environmental Medicine
Environmental Medicine is a medical subspecialty that primarily uses epidemiology and toxicology to identify, prevent and treat harmful human health effects that occur as a result of exposure to environmental hazards such as chemicals, microbes (bacteria, fungi, viruses), and physical agents (radiation, noise, light, heat, cold).

An environmental medical specialist can help identify causes of the injuries and illnesses of which workers or plaintiffs are complaining and can rule out erroneous theories. This can serve to focus environmental testing, assist legal actions, and add factual content to regulatory negotiations by determining what, if any, cause-effect relationships exist between the exposure and injury. Contact us to discuss specific environmental medical services available.

Environmental Risk Mitigation Structuring
The professionals at USI ERMG can help develop various risk management techniques to either augment or substitute for environmental insurance policies. Important techniques such as Liability Buyouts, Early Exit Strategies, Finite Risk programs, and alternate funding mechanisms can mean the difference between a transaction happening or a transaction abandoned.

Environmental Law Profiles
Environmental Law is an integral and critical piece of environmental risk management process. The application of environmental laws, regulations, permits and compliance requirements forms the basis of many entities' environmental liability exposures. Environmental laws and regulations impact how a corporation will conduct its operations on a past, present, and future basis.

The magnitude of monetary fines, cleanup costs, and toxic tort settlements and judgments are such that environmental law must be integrated into the Environmental Risk Management process. A risk manager's decision-making process must fact in the legal constraints imposed by environmental laws.

USI ERMG provides summaries of applicable laws and can research various legal issues, including contract construction. We can provide an insight into the application and statutory/regulatory scheme of each environmental law so the risk manager can better understand how these laws will affect their business decisions and strategies.

Environmental Liability Loss Modeling
Environmental Loss Modeling is a very useful tool in determining and forecasting an entity's loss potential with respects to toxic tort and bodily injury claims. Once data has been developed, there are many applications for the information including Claims, Funding Requirements, Insurance, M&A, and Product Liability.

Unlike a typical actuarial forecast, we apply environmental medicine to critically review health effects from exposures to various substance and products. Next we construct the health effects model and then overlay and factor the trends in litigation, geography and product/substance.

Although similar information is used for actuarial models, Environmental Loss Modeling differs by using direct or surrogate information to estimate the numbers or range of people exposed, direct or surrogate information to estimate the time and intensity (dose) of the exposure, published information about the dose-response relationship between exposure to the hazard and adverse effects to estimate the likelihood and severity of adverse human health effects, and published information about the time course of the adverse effect or disease to estimate the date of discovery of the effect. This provides a more comprehensive assessment than conventional actuarial models that, in their simplest form, project trends from past data without accounting for the time curves of onset or disease-specific characteristics. Such modeling enables risk managers to better deal with the consequences of claims.

Environmental Technologies
The USI ERMG professionals can provide information on various environmental remediation technologies. Such knowledge is important when reviewing reports, negotiating with underwriters, or handling claims issues. There are many different types of remediation technologies and corrective measure techniques that can be implemented to contain and clean up environmental contamination. Site-specific factors are important to the selections of a feasible environmental technology that can achieve cleanup criteria for a given site. Each contaminated site will have its own unique geographic setting, environmental conditions, and site usage history. The feasible remedial methods must then be analyzed using cost, reliability, and time-to-completion as the comparative criteria.

Environmental Claims Management
Claims issues are clearly testing environmental insurance policies. Claim strategies are crucial, and should be developed early on, incorporating the legal perspective. USI ERMG stands ready to provide claims management services unique to the environmental arena and can integrate specific disciplines into the claims process.

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