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15 Oxford J. Legal Stud. 537 (1995)
Demystifying D&O Insurance

handle is hein.journals/oxfjls15 and id is 551 raw text is: Demystifying D&O Insurance COLIN BAXTER* 1 Background Matrices A Introduction The first thing to strike anyone wanting to get to grips with the subject of directors' and officers' liability insurance is the dearth of attention given to it in the serious academic journals.' The second, once the researcher seeks en- lightenment by talking to practitioners in the field and by reading the obscurer professional publications or promotional literature produced by the insurance industry, is the difficulty in making sense of much of what is uttered. A common frustration is that different accounts of the subject will appear contradictory, though the reality is that many of them, like the reports on the nature of the elephant by the six blind men in the famous poem,2 will be impeccable accounts of part of the story. Plainly, any discussion of market trends needs to be read with careful regard for its time and place, but it is unfortunately all too easy to read comment about the social value of insurance or the desirability of giving company directors peace of mind without gaining any clear idea as to who is being insured against what, or what it is exactly that needs to be insured against. It is not, however, the aim of this article to hunt for motes in the eyes of others,3 nor to produce a 'Which' report on the sales talk.4 The twin objectives are to chart the features which either lead people astray or allow them to present a distorted picture of the field and to highlight some of the more important questions of policy and practice which are raised. * Law School, University of Hull. The author wishes to acknowledge the support and assistance of his School Research Committee, Diane Ryland (the School Research Assistant) and his student researchers Yu En Ong and Catherine Wright. 1 Professor Reuben Hasson laments this state of affairs in relation to the Law of Insurance generally in a seminal article: 'Subrogation in Insurance Law: A Critical Evaluation' (1985) 5 OJLS 416. A massive recent exception is Vanessa Finch's 'Personal Liability and Corporate Control: The Role of Directors' and Officers' Liability Insurance' (1994) 57 MLR 880. 2 J. G. Saxe, 'The blind men and the elephant'. 3 Generally the 'obscurer' works will not be specifically referred to as they will not be available to most people. The author was lucky in finding a big insurance company which was kind enough to supply him with copies of some extremely interesting materials from its own specialist collection. 4 For one thing, the odds are that many of the utterances will have been superseded at least once before this work appears in print. ' Oxford University Press 1995 Oxford Journal of Legal Studies Vol 15, No 4

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