Our View on Our Partners

It is of the utmost importance to us to partner only with financially stable insurance companies prepared and able to properly defend your claims when they arise.

Because children in care now can file a lawsuit many years after aging out of the system, it is important for child welfare organizations to secure insurance with an insurance company that is likely to be around many years into the future. Your insurance coverage can be the most comprehensive coverage in the history of the insurance industry, but if the insurance company is not around to pay the claim, the coverage is not worth the paper it is printed.

Although no one can ever see so clearly into the future as to predict if and when an insurance company is going to falter financially, Child Welfare Insurance Services works hard to do its best to identify insurance carriers that are prudent in their underwriting, claims handling, and investments.

We have seen many insurance companies decide to insure child welfare organizations, and after one too many claims or one claim resulting in a million dollar payout, they cancel all of their child welfare clients.

We have also seen many insurance companies go out of business for a myriad of reasons. Claims reported to these now defunct carriers are left to the state’s Department of Insurance to try to sort out. For all intents and purposes, the child welfare agency will find that it has self-insured this, and any other, claim that may arise going back to that coverage period. If the organization does not have the financial ability to defend and/or pay the claim, their doors could close.

Through the years, we have seen too many insurance companies work harder at denying claims than paying them. We’ve also seen too many lawyers inexperienced at defending child welfare organizations fail to raise defenses that have been proven to demonstrate that taking care of kids is NOT a strict liability endeavor. When a claim is mismanaged, resulting in a payout that should not have been made, it drives the premiums up and sometimes makes it impossible for the organization to obtain future coverage at all.

While we are not lawyers and cannot guarantee that every lawyer ever hired by one of our partner insurance companies will perform perfectly, what we can do is continually work to identify lawyers who understand child welfare, have a heart for kids, are experienced litigators, and then to collaborate with those lawyers, with the insurance company claims adjusters, and, most importantly, with our insureds to make sure that each serious claim is resolved in the best possible way given its particular circumstances.

The companies CWIS contracts with have passed rigorous qualifications, not the least of which is their long view of insuring this class of business. They have proven their long-term commitment to insuring child welfare organizations with every payment of a sexual misconduct or death claim. This may not seem like a very significant issue until you consider the insurance companies that have temporarily insured child welfare organizations before either canceling all child welfare policyholders or going out of business entirely.

Our Insurance Company Partners

Tudor Insurance Company, a wholly owned subsidiary of Western World Insurance Company, has partnered exclusively with Child Welfare Insurance Services to insure foster family agencies since 1998. In the years since then, Tudor has steadily expanded our guidelines to allow us to write the broadest range of child welfare organizations. By this, as well as the fact that they continue to insure child welfare providers after handing the most difficult of claims, they have proven that they are in this for the long haul.

They are a privately held insurance company that is not subject to the whims of Wall Street or the short-sighted vision of last quarter’s results. Most of the top management staff have been with the company for more than twenty years. With the mergers, acquisitions, closures and general turnover prevalent in the insurance industry, the longevity evidenced at Western World/Tudor speaks volumes about the stability and consistency of the company. Since 1998, they have proven themselves committed to understanding the risks that child welfare professionals and organizations face on a daily basis, and most importantly, committed to properly defending their insureds when a lawsuit is filed.

Tudor is A.M. Best rated “A+ VIII,” which means that the A.M. Best company, the most authoritative source of insurance company financial stability ratings and information, believes that Tudor has a superior ability to meet their ongoing obligations to policyholders (Click here for the A.M. Best listing for Tudor Insurance).

Markel Insurance Company and Child Welfare Insurance partnered together in late 2006 to create a program to extend the excellent Markel coverage and service to types of child welfare organizations they had not previously insured. We diligently sought Markel as a partner because of their long history of insuring children’s camps, daycare centers, and private schools. Their reputation as a stable company that does not compromise their principles to build premiums made them an excellent partner. We constantly monitor the child welfare environment to apply up-to-date information to our risk selection techniques, and they provide liability, property, auto, and excess liability coverage to those child welfare organizations that qualify for our program.

Markel receives high marks for financial stability and claims paying ability from insurance industry analysts. In addition, they have access to the financial and underwriting resources of their parent company, Markel Corporation, whose A.M. Best Company Financial Strength is rated at "A Excellent" in Category XII. Additionally, Duff & Phelps rates their Claims Paying Ability at A+.

Our insurance company partners will write qualified child welfare

organizations only through Child Welfare Insurance Services.