Reinsurance Editing and Proofreading Services

Three storms cross the same coast in eleven days. Whether that is one loss or three decides whether the cedant recovers once above a retention or three times below it, and the difference is several hundred million. The treaty defines an event in a clause of about forty words that was copied from the previous year, which was copied from the year before that.

We edit what reinsurers, cedants and brokers produce — treaty and facultative wordings, event and occurrence definitions, submission and renewal documentation, loss notifications and claims presentations, actuarial and exposure summaries for underwriters, commutation and dispute correspondence, and the placing slips that summarise all of it. Our editors work on wordings whose ambiguities surface once a decade and cost a fortune.

The definition of an event is where a reinsurance treaty is tested, and its failure is a clause carried forward without anybody asking what it would do in a real loss. Aggregation is the question every large claim turns into. We work through these so the hours clause states its period, its start point and who chooses that start point, since a 72-hour clause where the cedant elects the commencement behaves differently from one where it runs from first loss; so the peril is defined for the aggregation question specifically, given that wind, flood and storm surge from one system may or may not be one event and the wording usually assumes the answer; so the geographical scope of an event is stated where it matters, because a definition with no boundary can aggregate losses across a continent; so the treatment of a series of losses from one cause is addressed separately from losses in one period, as these are different aggregation routes and wordings routinely conflate them; so the interaction with the cedant's own policy wordings is considered, since a reinsurance event definition that does not match the inwards book creates a gap the cedant carries; so any following-form language is checked against what it is following; so the clause is tested against the last three real events before renewal rather than after; and so anything the parties could not agree is recorded rather than left ambiguous. Wordings written this way are argued about less.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including treaty wordings, loss information, pricing and dispute correspondence. We are editors rather than underwriters, actuaries or lawyers, and we give no legal advice and no view on coverage, aggregation or any claim. What we can do is make the clause say what the parties meant.