About This Interest Group

The courtroom, the classroom, and the conference room: these are among the places you will most likely find members of the CPCU Society’s CLEW Interest Group. CLEW members share a commitment to the pursuit and application of sophisticated technical knowledge in the fields of risk and insurance and in the surrounding legal environment.
 
The interest group was founded in the 1990s, as a home and resource for a diverse segment of CPCU Society members whose professional paths tended toward independence: attorneys representing or counseling insurers or insureds in claims and coverage matters and industry professionals putting their experience and expertise to work as consultants or as witnesses in contested insurance-related matters. When the group formed, the CLEW acronym stood for Consultants, Litigators & Expert Witnesses. Today, those initials stand for Coverage, Litigators, Educators & Witnesses, and CLEW’s members include CPCUs whose emphasis is on technical research and on the development and spread of insurance knowledge in universities and through continuing professional education. CLEW activities include presenting one or more educational programs at the CPCU Society Annual Meeting, which commonly include a “Mock Trial”; publication of articles in both CPCU Society publications and other industry journals; and a growing number of webinars through the Society. Participation in these activities provides CLEW members the opportunity to interact with, and to share their technical expertise with, fellow industry professionals.

 

A Message From the Chair

By George M. Wallace, JD, CPCU
Past Chair, CLEW Interest Group Committee

The only constant is change.
   -- Heraclitus

Things are more like they are now than they have ever been before.
   -- Dwight D. Eisenhower

For professionals, change and the task of maintaining continuity within change are facts of life. Nowhere is that more true, perhaps, than within the profession of insurance, which by its very nature deals in uncertainty and in preparing to respond to an often clouded future. Within the CPCU Society, and within the CLEW Interest Group, change and continuity within change are hallmarks of our professional lives.

The CPCU Society draws its membership from across the full range of a multifaceted industry. Within the Society, CLEW may be the interest group that casts its net most widely. To have pursued and earned the CPCU designation marks each Society member as an exceptional individual within our profession. As experts, consultants, legal professionals, and educators, CLEW members share a level of experience, skill and focused knowledge that makes them “exceptional among the exceptional.”

The CLEW Interest Group strives to provide an outlet for its members to share their expertise and to have access to one another’s skills, analyses and informed opinions. We work as well to share our talents with other Society members and with the risk and insurance profession at large through seminars, webinars, and publications, as well as in the real-world arenas of litigation, dispute resolution, education, and consultation.  In perpetually changing times, striving for substantive professional excellence is a necessary constant. As the CPCU Society pursues its mission of heightening the professional skills, knowledge, ethics and success of its members, CLEW aspires to stand as a resource and a leader.