Connecticut

An excerpt of my piece for the Connecticut Law Tribune about the legal impacts of Superstorm Sandy:

 Superstorm Sandy struck a less-devastating blow to Connecticut than it did to New Jersey and New York. Still, the Oct. 29, 2012, hurricane cut a wide swath in terms of affecting the state's legal community.

There are expectations of litigation over insurance coverage. Attorneys working for governmental agencies have helped to put into place better disaster planning. And there have been pro bono efforts to assist storm victims.

As of May 2013, 47,002 residential-property claims were reported in Connecticut as a result of the storm. There were also 4,460 commercial-property claims, 2,772 flood claims, and 1,212 business interruption claims, according to the Connecticut Department of Banking & Insurance.

Disaster Litigation

While it's been nearly 14 months since the storm hit, Sandy-inspired litigation will take a while to fully develop, said Ryan Suerth, of Ryan Suerth LLC in Hartford, who represents policyholders. He explained that it often takes more than a year for policyholders to learn that their insurance claims have been denied or that they will get less money than they had hoped.

"Any major weather is going to lead to litigation, just for the reason there is a lot of damage and not all of it gets covered by insurance," Suerth said.

Michael McCormack, a Hinckley Allen attorney who chairs the Connecticut Bar Association's Insurance Law Section, said he has seen few Sandy-related claims being filed in court so far. One reason, he said, is "the insurance companies responded quickly. They worked with policyholders as best as they could." Secondly, he said, many consumers lack flood insurance, meaning that instead of making a claim on their homeowner's policy they must apply to Federal Emergency Management Agency's National Flood Insurance Program.

But Regen O'Malley, an insurance defense lawyer with O'Connell, Attmore & Morris in Hartford, predicted that Sandy will ultimately result in more legal activity than did 2011's Tropical Storm Irene. One insurance issue that often prompts legal disputes is the question of whether property damage was caused by rain or flooding.

"It really depends upon what the policy says [is covered] for those types of claims," O'Malley said. "And with [Hurricane] Katrina and now Sandy, there might be multiple causes. There might be wind, flood, storm surge and something else."

For some policies, coverage is denied if multiple factors caused damage and some of those factors are not listed in the policy.

 Gregory Podolak, of Saxe Doernberger & Vita in Hamden, explained that some homeowner polices cover only "named perils." The most common of these include lightning, fire, rain, windstorms and theft. But exactly how these terms are defined in a specific policy can have a dramatic impact on a consumer's "coverage position," Podolak said. Many policies have specific deductibles and coverage limits related to specific named perils, he added. And Legal issues arise when there are multiple perils that could have caused property damage, he agreed.

Another insurance issue arising from Sandy is business interruptions caused by the loss of electric power. Some parts of the state lost power for a week or more, and businesses filed claims seeking lost revenues for days they could not operate.

"What Sandy and Irene have done is highlight some of the issues that don't come to the forefront as often," Podolak said.

Cases that do go into litigation may involve claims of bad faith by insurers and violations of the Connecticut Unfair Trade Practices Act and the Connecticut Unfair Insurance Practices Act. There also may be litigation against insurance brokers and agents for allegedly not recommending sufficient coverage, attorneys said.

An excerpt of the piece I wrote for The Connecticut Law Tribune on the Children's Law Center of Connecticut, which is celebrating 20 years of protecting children this year:

After 6-year-old Ayla was murdered, Judith Hyde heard a voice inside her head. The message: Create a children's legal advocacy center to represent young children in family court.

Hyde had founded the Child Protection Council of Northeastern Connecticut, which included a small program to provide supervision for court-ordered visits between parents and their children. During one of those visits, Ayla Rose Moylan was shot and killed by her father, who was apparently upset by his former wife's plan to remarry. The visit supervisor, Joyce Lannan, was shot too and ended up blinded in one eye.

Out of Ayla's death and out of Hyde's intuition came the founding of the Children's Law Center of Connecticut, an organization whose core service is providing legal advocates to children in highly contentious family court cases. Hyde wrote in a piece of literary writing that she shared with the Law Tribune that, after the shooting incident, she felt tired and wanted time to recuperate. But the voice inside pushed back, telling Hyde: "Now is the time when you will have people with you to make this happen."

Twenty years later, the center represents children in eight of Connecticut's judicial districts with plans to expand into Norwich next year if funding stays steady, according to Executive Director Justine Rakich-Kelly. The organization has been celebrating its 20th anniversary with a series of events this year, including its annual gala held on Dec. 6.

Read the full story here.

I wrote a piece for The Connecticut Law Tribune on a law professor who has gone from reforming tax codes in China, Zambia, Vietnam and Gambia to proposing changes to how taxes are divided between states in which multistate corporations do business.

A story excerpt:

Richard Pomp has drafted tax codes in China, Zambia, Vietnam and Gambia.

One lesson he learned as an academic consultant is that it's a good idea to get the business community invested in the new tax rules. Another lesson is that a smaller country's taxing powers more closely parallels the circumstances in a state like Connecticut than in a big country like the United States.

A developing country "can't control its environment, [is] really at the mercy of forces outside of its control, [is] outgunned and outmanned" by the law firms and accounting firms hired by global corporations, said Pomp, a professor at the University of Connecticut School of Law.

Because a state government faces similar challenges, Pomp decided to parlay his international tax work into studies of state taxation. He was interested in how state governments with their modest powers figure out how to fairly tax businesses that operate in their jurisdiction and in many others as well.

The professor's expertise in state taxation has proved useful as he spent 383 hours on a pro bono project as the hearing officer for the Multistate Tax Commission on proposed changes to the Multistate Tax Compact.

The compact was developed after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that states could tax interstate commerce through state income taxes. The commission is the administrative arm of the compact.

It was a national, non-partisan association known as the Uniform Law Commission that first came up with a way to fairly divide the taxable income for multistate corporations among the states in which those corporations do business. That model law, the Uniform Division of Income for Tax Purposes Act, was developed in 1957.

According to Pomp, the act provided the states with a fair way to tax multistate corporations by using a formula based on what percentage of its property, payroll dollars and sales totals that a corporation has within any single state's borders. (Connecticut never bought into the act, Pomp said. Instead, it bases its taxes on a single factor—the percentage of a company's sales that come from Connecticut.)

However, Pomp said, the taxing model has become antiquated over the last half century, with the economic shift away from manufacturing and toward service industries, as well as the development of the Internet and the digitalization of what used to be tangible property.

As a result, many states have moved away from the Uniform Division of Income for Tax Purposes Act, and have adopted their own tax-computing formulas, often for the purpose of economic development and attracting business to their states. "As the economy gets more complicated, everyone realizes that this model act that goes back to 1957 is hardly a model anymore," Pomp says.

When the Uniform Law Commission decided against updating the model law, the Multistate Tax Commission decided to step into the breach. Pomp's report to the commission suggests changing the formula for taxing multistate businesses by allowing each state to weigh the factors of sales, payroll and property however it chooses. He does, however, suggest giving the percentage of sales a company has in a state twice the weight of the other factors.

The Multistate Tax Commission's executive committee is slated to debate Pomp's report on Dec. 12. Pomp said he hopes that some of his suggestions will provide food for thought even though he proposed changes to the commission's own recommendations. Shirley Sicilian, general counsel for the Multistate Tax Commission, said during a recent press conference on Pomp's report that the goal of the model revisions is to provide something for state legislatures to draw on as they modernize their own tax laws.

While the American economy has been officially out of recession for four years, social service providers told me for a piece I did for the Stamford Advocate that the need for assistance for the least well-off has not slackened. On this day of Thanksgiving, the need for social services is a reminder to give if you have the means to do so and to be grateful for the means that you do have.

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An excerpt of the story:

Robert M. Arnold, president and CEO of Greenwich-based Family Centers, which provides education, health and human services to children, adults and families in Fairfield County, said the economic recovery has been uneven, and people at the lowest rung of the economic ladder have had the lowest level of recovery.

"Things have to get really better up in the middle and the top to lift up the bottom level," Arnold said. "Things haven't gotten that good in the middle and the top to really lift up the bottom level."

Many people are working jobs on which they can barely subsist, Arnold said.

Jason T. Shaplen, chief executive officer of Stamford-based Inspirica, Inc., one of the largest providers of services to the homeless in Connecticut, said that the demand for his organization's services is at a record level. The number of people living in the street in Connecticut has increased 82 percent in the past three years and the number of homeless people in Greenwich and Stamford increased 45 percent in the past year, according to Shaplen.

Nationally, 100 million Americans live in poverty or live within 50 percent of the poverty line, Shaplen added.

Historically, homelessness was connected to people having mental health problems, substance abuse problems or lack of education, Shaplen said. While all those things still cause people to become homeless, the new driver for homelessness is people being unable to find work or make enough money from their work to meet all of their needs, especially in a housing market as expensive as lower Fairfield County's, Shaplen said.

The winter is an especially hard time for people in poverty in Fairfield County because they have the additional seasonal expenses of heating, warm winter clothing and maintaining vehicles that are not in great repair to survive winter weather, Arnold said.