Fundamentals of Insurance Regulation

Raymond Guenter is a member of the faculty of Boston University School of Law’s Morin Center for Banking and Financial Law Studies, where he has taught Government Regulation of Insurance for the last 20 years. He has also taught Banking Law and Regulation as a lecturer-in-law at the University Of Connecticut School Of Law. He has been of counsel to the Bergen Law Offices, L.L.C., Albuquerque, New Mexico, for the past 13 years. During 10 years of that association, the Bergen firm represented Amerind Risk Management, a risk pool organized under 12 U.S.C. 477, that offers a variety of insurance products to over 250 Indian tribes, their housing authorities and tribal businesses as well as to individual tribal members. The firm has provided counsel on a broad range of insurance issues including insurance defense work, development of policy forms, corporate structure and the application of federal, state and tribal insurance regulations. He served as Executive Vice President and General Counsel of Shawmut National Corporation, a regional bank holding company, from 1976 until 1994. He is a member of the Executive Committee of the Connecticut Bar Association’s Financial Institutions Section and is a member and past Co-Chair of the Boston Bar Association’s Banking Law Committee. He is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Syracuse University, and received his LL.B. degree from Harvard Law School. Publications include: The Insurance Industry and Its Products, ABA-CLE program on Insurance Regulation, November 8, 2001; Rediscovering The McCarran- Ferguson Act’s Commerce Clause Limitation, 6 Connecticut Insurance Law Journal 255 (2000); Bank Insurance Powers—Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow, 17 Annual Review of Banking Law 351 (1998), cited in Bay State Savings Bank v. Baystate Financial Services, LLC., 484 F Supp. 205 (2007), Goldstein v. Savings Bank Life Ins. Co. of Massachusetts, 21 Mass. L. Rptr. 204 (2006) and Bay State Savings Bank v. Bay State Financial Services, LLC, 338 F. Supp. 2d 181 (2004); and The Lance Legacy—Title VIII of the Financial Institutions Regulatory and Interest Rate Control Act of 1978, 96 Banking Law Journal 292 (1979). Elisabeth Ditomassi is a member of the faculty of Boston University School of Law’s Morin Center for Banking and Financial Law Studies, where she has taught Government Regulation of Insurance since 2008. Currently she is Head of Compliance and Regulatory Affairs for North America for a large global insurer. The insurer offers specialty property and casualty coverages in the insurance and reinsurance markets worldwide and in Lloyd’s markets throughout the world through its Lloyd’s Syndicate. Prior to this position, she acted in a similar capacity for another global specialty lines insurer, where she further served as the group’s Global Compliance Head, overseeing regulatory activities in 10 countries through the Lloyd’s market. Elisabeth previously spent seven years as a Deputy Commissioner and General Counsel for the Massachusetts Division of Insurance where she served three commissioners. One of the highlights of her tenure as a regulator included the period when the division successfully converted the country’s last remaining fix-and-establish private passenger automobile market to a competitive market. She also presided over or supervised all major financial transactions that came before the division, including mergers and acquisitions and reddomestications of insurance companies in addition to advising on the Massachusetts Health Care Reform Act which became the blueprint for the federal Affordable Care Act. She spent the early part of her legal career litigating commercial disputes in Fox, Horan, Camerini, LLP in New York and prosecuting public corruption cases within in the Office of the Attorney General of Massachusetts. Elisabeth was appointed by the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court to a four-year term as a member of the Massachusetts Board of Bar Overseers in 2009. The Board oversees administrative disciplinary actions brought against Massachusetts attorneys charged with misconduct. Currently, she is a member of The Boston Club, which is one of the most comprehensive associations of executive women and leaders in the Northeast. The club’s primary mission is to promote the advancement of women in leadership roles. She is a graduate of Tufts University and received her Juris Doctor from the Boston University School of Law. Elisabeth speaks on conference panels several times per year on such insurance issues as global regulatory convergence, emerging trends in insurance regulation, federal versus state regulation, and corporate governance.