E&S/Specialty

For fiscal year 2010, the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission received nearly 100,000 new private sector charges of employment discrimination--a record high and a jump of 7 percent over 2009, the agency reported.

The Dodd-Frank Act has reopened the door to U.S. regulatory action against some foreign entities after a recent Supreme Court decision had limited the reach of the U.S. legal system, according to experts.

Participants in the excess and surplus lines industry generally expect a replay of 2010 market conditions in 2011, but that does not mean they believe the soft market is a "new normal" for the property and casualty industry.

Industry groups reiterated their support for a National Conference of Insurance Legislators' proposal to implement a new surplus lines law, rather than a competing National Association of Insurance Commissioners' proposal.

When Louis Levinson of Argo Group described a recent restructuring of the company's U.S. E&S units to NU last month, he began with a simple comparison of two organizational charts.

The vast majority of domestic specialty carriers put the size of the program business market at $20 billion or over in a recent survey, and a third of the respondents