NVCA Today

Horror stories. A guest at a backyard barbeque stumbles on a loose step leaving her confined to a wheelchair. While driving home from work, a pedestrian on a crosswalk is struck and killed. A teenage son has posted disparaging and threatening comments on his blog about other students in his high school, causing significant concern over the student's safety. All are tragic, but factual.

The unfortunate reality is that these stories typically result in multi-million dollar litigation. Aside from the huge damage amounts accompanying these types of lawsuits, it is not unusual for defense costs in these cases to reach into the millions. All of this threatens the security of personal assets of defendants. Significant personal wealth, that likely took years to establish, could be gone in the blink of an eye, literally just as quickly as one of these horror stories unfolded.

People with significant personal assets purchase homeowners insurance coverage to address their personal liability exposures, usually with the purchase of a "personal umbrella" policy. However, many high net worth individuals have not adequately scaled their personal liability needs to meet their increasing accumulation of assets. The problem is caused by a combination of the inability of certain personal lines insurers to offer higher limits of liability, lack of important coverages in a standard personal liability umbrella policy and excessive cost.

To address this issue, TechAssure, in conjunction with Chubb Personal Insurance, is pleased to offer NVCA members a Group Personal Excess program offering worldwide liability limits up to $50M to each individual participant on a per occurrence basis. The program is designed to give a firm's key executives and employees access to high limits of liability not easily acquired in the marketplace, with little underwriting scrutiny. As an important component of any wealth management plan, Chubb's Group Personal Excess program provides a key benefit at group discounted rates.

The program is designed to address the needs of high net worth individuals in the venture and private equity space. In addition to providing defense costs outside the policy's limits of liability, some of the policy's merits also include uninsured/underinsured motorists coverage up to $5M, employment practices liability (for example, associated with household employees and caregivers), not-for-profit Directors & Officers Liability, identity theft resolution services and kidnap expense.

Time, effort and self-sacrifice builds a lifestyle. An unexpected split second can derail it. Tragic events are not planned. But properly protecting your personal assets can be.

Pamela W. Mason, AAI, is TechAssure's NVCA Committee Chairperson and the Management Liability Practice Leader of Mason & Mason Technology Insurance Services, Inc. Ms. Mason specializes in risk assessment and coverage solutions in the areas of private equity and venture capital liability, corporate securities liability, directors and officers liability, portfolio liability programs, fiduciary liability and employment practices liability. Ms. Mason can be reached at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it or 781-447-5531 X132.