Tag: RiskManaged

What the Olympics Teach Us About Event Risk Management and Insurance

The Winter Olympics kick off in Milano Cortina this Friday.

The Olympics are often viewed through the lens of athletic excellence, national pride, and global spectacle. Less visible (but just as impressive) is the risk management infrastructure required to make the Games possible.

Hosting the Olympic Games is an exercise in managing construction risk, vendor risk, weather risk, and mass-crowd liability—all under intense global scrutiny. Those same risks, scaled down, apply to corporate events, conferences, festivals, and public gatherings everywhere.

Here are a few key lessons worth stealing.

1. Venue Construction and Property Risk Can’t Be an Afterthought

Constructing and protecting Olympic venues is a massive undertaking. Property damage, delays, design defects, and contractor errors are all foreseeable risks.

Smart hosts protect themselves in two ways:

  • Carrying robust property and builder’s risk insurance, and
  • Negotiating contracts that push liability for construction and operational failures back to the vendors responsible for the work.

Insurance is critical—but contracts do the heavy lifting when things go wrong.

2. Vendor Risk Transfer Is Where Many Events Fail

The Olympics rely on hundreds of vendors from security and staging to food service and entertainment.

Each vendor should:

  • Indemnify the host for risks arising out of their work
  • Carry insurance tailored to their services
  • Name the host as an additional insured, with coverage that applies before the host’s own insurance

Without this structure, the host becomes the insurer of first resort for someone else’s mistake.

3. Weather Happens, Cancellation Insurance Matters

Not every venue can be indoors, and not every risk can be engineered away. Weather-related disruptions are inevitable, especially for outdoor events.

A well-designed event cancellation policy can cover:

  • Lost revenue
  • Increased costs
  • Rescheduling expenses

When a natural cause forces changes, cancellation insurance can be the difference between a setback and a financial disaster.

4. Crowds Create Liability Regardless of Fault

When participants, patrons, or guests are injured at an event, the host is almost always a target, whether or not the host did anything wrong.

The best protection combines:

  • A strong general liability insurance program with sufficient limits, and
  • Aggressive risk transfer to vendors, so claims land where they belong

Risk allocation is a critical piece of event planning.

The Olympics remind us that world-class events don’t just run on logistics and talent. They run on planning for what might go wrong and making sure someone else’s insurance pays when it does.

Looking forward to enjoying the Games, and the lessons they quietly reinforce.

Winter Storms Crush the U.S. – Are You Covered?

As much of the country is buried in snow, now is a good time to pour a hot cup of coffee, pull up by the fireplace, and crack open a timeless classic: your property insurance policy.

Winter storms are no joke. Common risks include:
– transportation delays/cancellations impacting product deliveries
– pipes bursting
– gas or sewer lines freezing
– having an overtaxed HVAC system die
– employees, customers, or suppliers being snowed/plowed in and unable to get to you or your business

For years, the default in property insurance was to cover “ALL RISKS.”

This means that your property policy covered any risk of physical loss of or damage to property unless expressly excluded.

“ALL RISK” insurance puts the burden on insurers. Your loss is assumed to be covered unless proven otherwise.

In recent years, however, insurers have increasingly moved to “NAMED PERILS” policies.

A “NAMED PERILS” policy, as you might expect, covers only specifically identified risks of loss. Typical “NAMED PERILS” include:
– Fire
– Windstorm
– Flood
– Named Storm (i.e., hurricanes)

In a “NAMED PERILS” policy, the burden is on you (the policyholder) show that the cause of your property loss or damage is explicitly covered.

In a winter storm, there can be multiple causes of a single loss.

Knowing whether your property insurance is ALL RISKS or NAMED PERILS can make the difference in whether you are covered.

Stay warm, friends! What else do you want to know about property insurance?

2026 #RiskManaged Checklist for Employment Practices Liability Insurance Policies

Even award-winning organizations can have cultural blind spots and challenges. Smart companies buy employment practices liability (EPL) insurance to manage that risk.

Here is the 2026 #RiskManaged checklist to maximize the value of an EPL policy:

1. Make sure the EPL policy provides coverage for third-party claims.

The classic EPL policy covers claims like workplace harassment, discrimination, and failure to promote by an insured against another insured.

Increasingly, however, members of the public (e.g., customers or clients) are making such claims too—especially with regard to discrimination.

2. The definition of “employee” needs to fit the organization’s structure.

EPL policies can treat everyone from directors and officers to volunteer interns as “employees” if asked.

This has no bearing on whether these individuals are “employees” for legal purposes, but does expand coverage.

3. Account for mass or class action litigation.

Many EPL policies treat these claims different because the stakes are higher.

Make sure you have coverage—even if it means a higher deductible for these claims.

4. Have counsel and rates pre-approved.

EPL policies are typically “eroding,” meaning defense costs erode the limits. EPL claims are expensive to defend. Have the right counsel at the right price set up in advance.