Keeping Up-to-Date
Want to know what is happening in the property & casualty insurance coverage world? Get the three-volume Casualty Insurance Claims – 4th Edition, which is updated twice a year. Work in the risk-management field? You need the two-volume Excess Liability – Rights and Duties of Commercial Risk Insureds and Insurers, 4th Edition, which is updated annually. Perhaps you are curious about how to figure out coverage for a natural or man-made disaster? Purchase the relatively new volume, CAT Claims – Insurance Coverage for Natural and Man-Made Disasters, First Edition. I'm only a contributing author to that one, but as the last two years have shown, natural disasters—ranging from drought and forest fires to solar storms and tsunamis—can create quite a bit of havoc. (See www.thomson.com for details about this text.)

Lots of Competition
Sometime this month, Thomson Reuters West will issue the 8th edition of a big 900+ page “handbook” titled Casualty, Fire & Marine Investigation Checklists. It is a field guide for property & casualty adjusters, covering everything from policy disputes to fraud, similar in organization to the three-volume Casualty Insurance Claims 4th but without all the specific references to policy wording and court interpretations. Assigned an entomology claim? This text provides a step-by-step investigative outline. How about a sidewalk falldown claim, or a latex allergy or food contamination claim?

There are more than a hundred individual types of claims with specific investigation instructions in just the premises, operations, and products areas alone designed to keep the adjuster out of trouble and cover every potential aspect of the claim. In more than 30 chapters, ranging from detailed investigation of injury claims and types of injuries to rules for evidence discovery while preventing spoliation, the book is a one-volume adjusters' claims manual. Got all that on your computer that you carry with you and reference regularly? Perhaps, but is it as detailed or current? Does it cover nanoparticals liability claims?

National Underwriter Company also publishes a vast library of insurance coverage and specific topic texts. Need an update on your CEUs for ethics? Try NU's Winning by the Rules – Ethics and Success in the Insurance Profession, 2nd Ed. There is even an online course to go with it that will get you the credit hours you need. Former Claims columnist and frequent Claims/National Underwriter contributor Kevin Quinley also has several books out there to assist the adjuster or risk manager, published by National Underwriter Co. There are probably other insurance publishers with similar texts or computer programs offering assistance to adjusters. Thomson Reuters West, which is primarily in the law book publishing business along with all their other services, has lots of competition, including Lexis Nexis. There are also competing books for the plaintiff bar to study.

History of the Checklists
When the former Claims (which was then known as Insurance Adjuster) Magazine columnist Pat Magarick, L.LM., retired – having written his monthly “P.M. Letter” for decades – he was already well-known in the insurance-education field. Central Book Co. of New York had published Pat's first edition of Check Lists in 1955, when he was the claims manager for Manufacturer's Casualty Ins. Co. He later became claims vice president for AIU. The spiral-bound book consisted of 250 pages, plus an index. The same year Prentice-Hall Inc. published the first edition of Successful Handling of Casualty Claims, a single volume of less than 500 pages. In 1974, Clark Boardman Co., a Rochester, N.Y., affiliate of the Lawyers Publishing Co., bought the publishing right to Successful Handling, although Pat still held the copyright. Clark Boardman also took over Checklists, publishing the third edition in 1975. Clark Boardman, a Thomson Company, also took over West Group (and a few years ago also Reuters News Service, as the company was a publisher of newspapers and other media.)

In 1978, I acquired B. David Hinkle's “Justin Adjuster” column in Insurance Adjuster Magazine. When Pat retired in the early 1990s, by then well over the age of 80, he asked me to take over his three textbooks, which by then also included Excess Liability, primarily a text on avoiding bad faith claims. My first adventure into this legal publishing world was the fourth edition of Casualty Investigation Checklists in 1994. Until Pat died a few years later, I simply updated and added to his third editions of Casualty Insurance Claims and Excess Liability. By that time, however, the West Group and Clark Boardman Callaghan merger had produced a number of other texts on bad faith, and Excess was, indeed, excess. With a new attorney contributor, J. Robert Persons, Excess was converted to a risk management-targeted text and broken into two volumes updated annually. It contains court cases that impact on typical corporate insurance plans that many chief risk officers never seem to get around to understanding, but also features alternative risk financing mechanisms, which led to my articles in the American Bar Association Tort & Insurance Section The Brief, and West's Insurance Litigation Reporter on managing litigation for a self-funding commercial entity.

Excess has been entirely rewritten, with only a few remaining mentions of Pat and his comments; about ten years ago, as individual chapters of the new edition of Casualty Insurance Claims, 4th, were being rewritten, chapters on ocean and inland marine insurance, property coverages, indirect loss, life and health insurance overlapped with casualty coverages, and new perils, such as terrorism, were added. Only a very few portions of Pat's original text remain, and those have been constantly updated in the semi-annual supplements.

Textbook Education Versus Computerized Education
As an old foggy no longer involved in the day-to-day handling of claims (I tried it a year or so ago as a temporary employee at a small auto insurance firm and, stuck behind two separate computers into which all the work was placed, hated it), I have never-the-less become involved in both printed and computerized claims education. Which is better? I grew up on textbooks. The only real computer around when I was in university was Univac, although some IBM computerized gizmo did punch out little green cards for the registration process each semester. Registration still gives me nightmares. Students in the late 1950s and early 1960s spent their time at the library, researching their papers. As I was then working at Dow Jones, running a bank of teletype machines, print media and the early days of television was all there was. The year I took the CPCU exams (there were five four-hour exams over two and a half days) learning was all from textbooks and those FC&S Bulletins. I don't know what they study now, although I did write part of one of their texts for CPCU 5.

Today both libraries and newspapers are closing. Books are read on little machines that are carried around. People get their news from cable TV or the Internet, and we wonder just how accurate it really is. (Of course, considering the “yellow journalism” of some of the Hearst and other papers in the 1920s, and the recent scandals of News Corp and the Murdochs, perhaps news was just as biased back then.) What did strike me as interesting was a recent study by the New York Times in which they discovered that those who read their newspaper in its print edition had better recall of what the news was than those who read the Internet edition.

I must grant that schools such as MIT, Harvard, Stanford, and similar world-class universities provide a superior education; that is why a good percentage of their student body consists of foreigners who will either remain in the U.S. to take the highly technical jobs or return home to Asia to compete with us. For-profit colleges advertise great education and a good job afterward, but all they seem to do is create student loan debt. Knowing several professors at local state universities, they tell me that the college students of today are coming out of high school totally unprepared for any advanced education. They cannot write a grammatical sentence; can't spell beyond five-letter words (although they all know the shorthand for texting); they don't know how to conduct research for a paper; and they reject the idea of reading any sort of textbook. Hence many colleges and universities have gone to computerized educational courses, about the only way they know how to deal with the current generation of students.

Education in the Global Context
Virtually every Asian and European nation is ahead of the U.S. in basic education, including math and science. I've heard that subjects such as geography or social sciences are not even taught in secondary schools any longer. Johnny and Jane can't find their way to the bathroom without a GPS or someone texting them the instructions. Watching “Are You Smarter than a Fifth Grader” on TV is revealing. Asked what states border Utah, a contestant said “Dahh, I don't know. Alaska? Ohio?” Is it any wonder the unemployment rate is around 8 percent nationally, and far higher in other areas? The typical American can't qualify for the typical low-tech job, if such jobs were available, let alone the many high-tech jobs that are available. Of course, if they are collecting unemployment benefits, they don't want a low-paying job anyway.

Knowing how to text might have been helpful a century ago when railroad telegraphers used code to transmit dispatcher instructions: “WB 7 Eng 248 meet EB 12 Eng 1102 at MP 402. 7 sup.” In real language, westbound train No. 7, with engine 248 was to meet eastbound train 12 with engine 1102 at milepost 402 and take the siding as 7 was superior. But the telegraphers, usually station agents, had to know Morse Code and how to type, as such a message would be typed (with all the words) in triplicate: one for the engineer, to be hooped up as Number 7 blew past the station; another for the conductor on the caboose; and a third for the record book. It had to be accurate or Number 7, probably a passenger train, would collide head-on with Number 12 somewhere about ten miles west of milepost 402. Thomas A. Edison got his start as a teenager as a railway telegrapher. Would you trust your neighbor's kid with such a responsibility – sort of like an FAA air traffic controller – today?

So, I would vote for throwing out the laptops and bringing back the pen, paper, and typewriter, restoring the faithful and up-to-date textbook to its rightful place. But this is the 21st century, and the old street adjusters that learned from those textbooks and used paper and pen are now retired or about to retire, and where our industry will find their replacements remains to be seen. Hence this old fuddy-duddy will continue to contribute to both means of claims education and pray for the best.