Digital
risk management For insurers
Oliver Wyman, Sep 2017. Implementing digital technologies within insurers is changing the risks which need to be identified, measured and managed. We give some examples and perspectives on how the risk landscape is evolving.
Oliver Wyman, Sep 2017. Implementing digital technologies within insurers is changing the risks which need to be identified, measured and managed. We give some examples and perspectives on how the risk landscape is evolving.
Links to Risk and Risk Management
Aaron James, The Distinctive Significance of Systemic Risk, 30 Ratio Juris 239 (2017), available at SSRN.
In one of his more famous aphorisms, Oliver Wendell Holmes remarked that “[o]ur law of torts comes from the old days of isolated, ungeneralized wrongs, assaults, slanders, and the like,” whereas “the torts with which our courts are kept busy to-day are mainly the incidents of certain well known businesses … railroads, factories, and the like.”1 In the 120 years since Holmes penned his remark, our social world has become ever more organized. Holmes wrote before the mass production of consumer products and before environmental harms on a global scale existed. Indeed, Holmes seems to have had in mind just one kind of systemic risk, namely, the repeat imposition of the same risk by an institution that repeats the same action over and over again. Railroads, for instance, run trains past the same intersections on a regular basis.
We are familiar with more advanced and diverse forms of systemic risk. Some products are characterized by risks that are present every time the product is used but that are responsible for physical harm only relatively rarely. Many product design defects are like this. The Ford Pinto gas tank is a case in point. The defective design was present in every Ford Pinto but its risks remained dormant until a car was involved in a collision. Other products impose unacceptable risks every time someone is exposed to them. Asbestos is the most notorious example. In still other cases, the independent actions of innumerable people coalesce into a critical mass and that critical mass imposes a major risk. Climate change is a case in point. It is surprising, then, that the distinctive issues raised by systemic risk imposition have received so little attention, and heartening to see that sophisticated political philosophers have now begun to pay them heed. In The Distinctive Significance of Systemic Risk, Aaron James, a political philosopher at the University of California at Irvine, zeros in on several of the thorniest moral issues presented by practices of systemic risk imposition. James is preoccupied with two questions. Continue reading "Is Systemic Risk Special?"
Explainer: how our
understanding of risk is changing
Under the traditional notion of risk, people react predictably based on how risk-tolerant they are. But our understanding of risk is changing. We now know that a whole host of factors, from your personal history to your mood and age, all come to bear on how you perceive and take on risk
Risk Culture – a regulator’s view
Under the traditional notion of risk, people react predictably based on how risk-tolerant they are. But our understanding of risk is changing. We now know that a whole host of factors, from your personal history to your mood and age, all come to bear on how you perceive and take on risk
Risk Culture – a regulator’s view
Robert W. Gordon, The Return of the Lawyer-Statesman?, 69 Stanford L. Rev. 1731 (2017).
Reading Robert W. Gordon’s Essay The Return of the Lawyer-Statesman?on Ben W. Heineman Jr.’s book, The Inside Counsel Revolution(an introduction and link to the book can be found here) reminded me of three virtues. One is of the review essay, the ability to luxuriate in another’s work and allow it to be seen through one’s own ideas. This is something I confess I have never attempted, fearing the reflex to critique or the urge to self-publicize would surface too strongly. The second is of the need to return to familiar but central ideas. Gordon has written on the themes in this essay many times before (see for example, Corporate Law Practice as a Public Calling and A New Role for Lawyers: The Corporate Counselor after Enron). His arguments are the more elegant for it and, importantly, our reading of Heineman is more rewarding too. But the third is the one that struck me most forcefully, which is the wisdom to be gained from well-told legal history.
The central virtue of Gordon’s essay is the historical contextualization of Heineman’ book. Gordon gives us a taut, rich, and informative narrative on the importance of political context. In seeking to answer whether General Counsel can be both [business] partner and [public] guardian as Heineman puts it, we are reminded how we have been here before: the tensions in the General Counsel role—and their currently high status in corporate affairs – are not peculiarly modern. Most importantly we also see how lawyers’ ethics are shaped by far larger forces than law schools and bar associations. So the influence of inter-war industrial relations, Reagonomics, the politics of corporate leaders, and latter day skepticism of the corporation post-financial crash may all play a role. Continue reading "Against Babbitry: What Legal History and Practical Leadership can Tell us about Lawyers’ Ethics"