Background
Frederick J. Fisher writes on professional, directors and officers, and fiduciary
liability issues for IRMI.com.
Mr. Fisher is the president of Fisher Consulting Group, Inc., and is the
founder of ELM Insurance Brokers, a wholesale and
managing general agent (MGA) facility specializing in
professional liability and specialty line risks. He is a member of the
Editorial Board for Agents of America, a faculty member of
the Claims College, and a member of the Executive Council, School of
Professional Lines as sponsored by the Claims & Litigation Management
Alliance. He is a course designer and webinar instructor for the Academy of
Insurance (sponsored by the Insurance Journal).
Since beginning his career, Mr. Fisher focused on one vision: providing
financial security to the client. The result was a successful 43-year career in
specialty lines insurance. In 1975, he began his
career on the service side, as an independent errors and omissions claims
adjuster. In 1982, he bought the company and continued with claims while
expanding the firm's services to include qualitative claim auditing, risk
management and loss control services, and acting as a third-party administrator
(TPA). Mr. Fisher's claim-auditing techniques and recommendations resulted
in substantial client savings (including the Southern California Rapid Transit
District, which is now known as the Los Angles County Metropolitan
Transportation Authority). Many insurers and self-insured's adopted not
only the performance standards raised in the audits but adopted his recommended
attorney management guidelines as a base, which are still in use today by many
major insurers. During that time, proprietary TPA and auditing software was
developed, which was state of the art at the time.
In 1995, Mr. Fisher formed what was known as ELM Insurance Brokers, a firm
that has acted as an MGA and wholesale broker of professional liability
insurance and specialty lines. He has lectured extensively on professional
liability issues since 1978 and authored over 64 articles in trade journals and
periodicals. He is the author of Broker Beware: Selling Real Estate within
the Law. Mr. Fisher designed a program to conduct on-site preunderwriting
risk management assessments of a client's professional liability
exposures.
In 1989, he became a founding member of the Professional Liability
Underwriting Society (PLUS) and was elected to the PLUS Board of Trustees in
1993. After serving in all officer capacities, Mr. Fisher was elected president
in 1997. He remains a special materials expert for several Registered
Professional Liability Underwriter courses and is the senior technical adviser
for Professional Liability Insurance, first
published by IRMI in 1990. Mr. Fisher was an original
faculty member and author of the professional liability courses (Level 1, 2,
and 3) offered by the Claims College—Professional Liability School as sponsored
by the Claims and Litigation Alliance from 2013 to 2016. He has taught over 100
continuing education classes and lectures. He testifies regularly as an expert
witness in cases dealing with the duties and obligations of professionals, as
well as on coverage and claims-made issues.