I just spent a sobering couple of days in New York City at the annual PLUS D&O Symposium. The consensus among speakers, which included top insurers, brokers and attorneys, is that when it comes to litigation, the worst is yet to come. And we're not just talking securities class-action (SCA) lawsuits affecting the financial services sector: this unprecedented and hellacious economy is perfectly capable of biting even stable businesses if their vendors, suppliers or other significant business others get hurt.

Try these 2009 projections from a variety of symposium panelists:

• 62,000 company bankruptcies
• 1 in 5 non-investment-grade companies in default
• As much as $500 billion in corporate bonds maturing over the next two years, with no refinancing available
• While more than half of the SCA suits filed in 2008 targeted banks, the trend will inevitably trickle down to other industries as bankrupcies rise

According to an Advisen D&O report released this week, since 1995, about 35 percent of large public companies that filed for bankruptcy were also named in securities class action lawsuits. That number jumped to 77 percent in 2007 and 2008. The problem is exacerbated by the increasing use of Side A-only D&O policies, which respond when a company can't reimburse its directors and officers for defense costs and indemnity payments — usually because the company is insolvent. Given this history, and the above projections, it's no wonder most of the thousand or so symposium attendees were wearing black.