Nelson
CHARLESTON -- Huddleston Bolen attorney Kevin Nelson will speak on "Consent to Settle" provisions in professional insurance policies as part of the Mountaineer Series Insurance Law Seminar to be held on Sept. 11-12, in Morgantown.
The seminar, sponsored by West Virginia Continuing Legal Education (WVCLE), will be held in conjunction with the West Virginia-East Carolina football game scheduled for Saturday afternoon. Nelson is managing partner of the Charleston office of Huddleston Bolen.
Nelson will discuss and analyze issues related to Consent to Settle policy provisions as they relate to professional liability policies obtained by lawyers, health care professionals, and insurance agents.
In particular, Nelson will discuss when insurers are obligated to obtain the consent of an insured before settling litigation and the legality of "hammer" clauses in policies that insurers may use to force settlement despite the presence of a consent clause.
He also will discuss the ethical quandary that an attorney may face when representing an insured whose insurer invokes a hammer clause and attempts to settle a case without consent.
Other topics to be addressed during the seminar include:
* Recent insurance law decisions
* Pending insurance cases
* "Exclusive Jurisdiction"
* "Reasonable Expectation" Doctrine
* Shamblin Doctrine
* Discovery of reserve, reinsurance, and reservation of rights information
* Issues arising from certificates of insurance
* Ethical issues in insurance litigation
The program is a practical, one-and-one half day program for attorneys and insurance executives. The seminar includes a nine-person faculty and is approved for 9.1 West Virginia Mandatory Continuing Legal Education (MCLE) credits, including 1.5 Ethics credits.
To be held at the WVU College of Law in Morgantown, the seminar consists of six sessions running from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Friday, and three sessions on Saturday running from 8:30 to 11:10 a.m. Football tickets for the WVU-ECU game are available on a first-come, first-serve basis through registration. For additional information, contact the WVCLE office at (304) 293-7255 or e-mail wvcle@wvu.edu.
A litigator with a broad background, Nelson has been the lead lawyer in trials in the areas of employment law, insurance, medical negligence, and energy law. A particular area of Nelson's emphasis in the insurance area has been in the representation of insurance agents, medical care providers, and attorneys facing claims under their professional liability policies.
He has served as a mediator and arbitrator in a variety of cases, and has been recognized for three consecutive years, including 2010, as a Best Lawyer for his work in Labor and Employment Law.
Nelson earned his J.D. degree from Washington and Lee University where he was a member of the Law Review. He was also President of his second year class, served as a student advocate in honors trials, and was Sports Editor of the law school newspaper The Law News. He has spoken regionally and nationally on a variety of employment and insurance related topics, as well as on electronic discovery issues.
In addition to his legal work, Nelson is the girls' soccer coach at Charleston Catholic High School, and was named the 2008 Mideast Sectional Coach of the Year for girls' soccer by the NFHS Coaches Association. He was also the West Virginia girls' Class AA-A Region III coach of the year in 2006 and the Kanawha Valley Girls' Coach of the Year in 2008. His 2007 team finished the season ranked first in the State in all classes.
In 2008, the team won the State AA-A championship, the first season that the sport was divided into two classifications. He is also the Vice-President of the Kanawha-Charleston Soccer Foundation, an organization dedicated to building soccer fields for recreational use in the Kanawha Valley, and serves on the State Secondary Schools' Activities Commission's Soccer Committee.
Huddleston Bolen is a law firm with more than 50 attorneys practicing in offices located in Huntington and Charleston in West Virginia and Ashland and Louisville in Kentucky. The firm, founded in 1871, represents clients in many practice groups, including banking and finance, health care, insurance, litigation, labor and employment, natural resources, real estate, transportation, and trusts and estates.
For more information about Huddleston Bolen, visit the firm's Web site at www.huddlestonbolen.com.