Insurance Cold-Start Interview

Insurance Cold-Start Interview

Purpose

Conduct a structured, staged interview with an insurance practice group — led by a supervising attorney or authorized designee — to gather the information required to populate practice-profiles/insurance.md. The skill walks through all eight profile fields in sequence, records every answer, and assembles a filled draft of the profile for the practice group's review and approval. It produces draft legal work product for attorney review — not legal advice and not a final configuration.

Use When

• A team is adopting AgentCounsel and needs to configure practice-profiles/insurance.md for the first time.
• An insurance practice group is being onboarded to the library and no current profile exists.
• The library is being stood up for the first time and the insurance area is included in scope.
• A practice group wishes to revisit or rebuild its profile from scratch rather than make incremental updates.

Required Inputs

• A knowledgeable person from the insurance practice group — a supervising attorney or an authorized designee — who can answer questions about the group's jurisdiction, positions, escalation rules, and review requirements.
• Any existing playbooks, templates, source-of-truth documents, or standard-form documents the group already uses, so they can be referenced or cited in the profile.

Do Not Use When

• The group is actively working a live insurance matter. This skill configures the library; it does not support an open matter.
• A practice-profiles/insurance.md already exists and is current. In that case this is a refresh, not a cold start — though the skill may still be used to rebuild the profile deliberately.
• No authorized person is available to answer. Do not complete the interview with guessed or inferred answers; record all gaps as [CONFIRM: ...] placeholders.
• The purpose is to handle a specific insurance matter (use the appropriate matter-level skill for that task).

Legal Safety Rules

• Produce draft legal work product for attorney review. This is not legal advice.
• Never guess or infer an answer to any interview question. If the interviewee cannot answer a question, record [CONFIRM: answer required from practice group] and move on.
• The filled profile is a draft. It must be reviewed and explicitly approved by the supervising attorney or practice group before it governs any AgentCounsel work product.
• Do not invent standard positions, clause preferences, escalation thresholds, or review rules. Record only what the interviewee provides.
• Do not include client-specific facts, client names, matter identifiers, or privileged details in the profile. The profile is a reusable group-level configuration, not a matter record.
• Do not state or imply that any threshold, position, or rule in the profile satisfies a legal requirement under any jurisdiction. Jurisdiction-specific legal obligations are for the attorney to verify.
• Flag every item the interviewee defers or leaves open with a visible [CONFIRM: ...] placeholder so the reviewer can see exactly what is unresolved.

Workflow

Stage 1 — Jurisdictions

Ask the interviewee:

• In which states or countries does the group practice insurance law most frequently?
• Does the group regularly engage with NAIC-uniform frameworks vs. state-specific regimes, and how is that allocation tracked?
• Are there foreign insurance markets (Lloyd's, Bermuda, Cayman captives) the group regularly engages with?
• Are there sectors of insurance — commercial, personal, reinsurance, surplus lines, captive — that drive most of the work?
• Are there jurisdictions or sectors the group treats as out of scope, requiring specialist outside counsel?

Record answers. Mark any unanswered item [CONFIRM: jurisdiction not yet specified].

Stage 2 — Client and Team Context

Ask the interviewee:

• Does the group represent primarily policyholders, carriers, brokers, reinsurers, or a mix?
• What types of insurance matters does the group handle most frequently — coverage advisory, claims handling, policy review, reinsurance, regulatory, bad-faith litigation?
• How is the team structured — partners, associates, claims specialists, policy-drafting specialists?
• How does the group coordinate with insurance brokers, claims professionals, and reinsurance counterparties?
• Are there client categories — Fortune 500 policyholders, individual policyholders, reinsurance markets — that require special handling?

Record answers. Mark any unanswered item [CONFIRM: client/team context not yet specified].

Stage 3 — Escalation Thresholds

Ask the interviewee:

• Which matters automatically require escalation — bad-faith concern, coverage denial, reservation of rights, settlement-authority question, reinsurance coverage dispute?
• Are there claim-value thresholds or coverage-amount thresholds that trigger escalation?
• When does a regulatory matter (market conduct, financial examination) require immediate specialist involvement?
• Which engagement types — coverage opinions, ROR letters, declaratory-judgment posture — require partner-level review regardless of size?
• Who is the designated escalation contact for insurance matters, and what is the expected turnaround?

Record answers. Mark any unanswered item [CONFIRM: escalation threshold not yet specified].

Stage 4 — Preferred Output Style

Ask the interviewee:

• Should insurance work product default to coverage-opinion format, claim-chronology format, policy-summary format, or memo format?
• What level of detail does the practice group expect — executive summary, full citation-supported coverage analysis, both layered?
• Are there house style rules for citation format (case law, regulatory guidance, policy provisions), coverage-determination flagging, or open-items lists in insurance work product?
• Does the group produce ROR letters, certificate-of-insurance reviews, or claim chronologies in standard formats?
• Are there particular deliverable types — coverage opinions, ROR letters, denial letters — for which the group has mandatory format requirements?

Record answers. Mark any unanswered item [CONFIRM: output style preference not yet specified].

Stage 5 — Source-of-Truth Documents

Ask the interviewee:

• What is the group's authoritative policy library and policy-form reference, and where is it stored?
• Is there an ROR letter template library, and how is it kept current?
• What document governs the group's coverage-issue precedent library?
• Are there reinsurance-precedent references the group treats as authoritative?
• Does the group maintain a jurisdiction-by-jurisdiction reference on bad-faith law, claims-handling regulations, and direct-action statutes?

Record answers and document names. Mark any unanswered item [CONFIRM: source document not yet identified].

Stage 6 — Standard Positions and Playbooks

Ask the interviewee:

• What is the group's default coverage-determination framework — when does a matter warrant a full coverage opinion vs. a coverage issue-spotting summary?
• What is the group's default reservation-of-rights posture — when warranted, what scope?
• What is the group's default bad-faith risk-assessment framework?
• What is the group's default subrogation posture — preservation, pursuit, waiver thresholds?
• What is the group's default position on additional-insured certificates and waivers of subrogation?

Record answers. Mark any unanswered item [CONFIRM: standard position not yet specified].

Stage 7 — Attorney Review Requirements

Ask the interviewee:

• At what stage does attorney review of insurance work product become mandatory — initial intake, draft coverage opinion, draft ROR letter, claims-handling decision, settlement authority?
• Are there work-product types for which attorney review is always required regardless of size — any coverage opinion, any ROR letter, any claims-handling decision above a threshold, any settlement above a threshold?
• What is the designated reviewer's role — handling attorney, supervising attorney, claim partner, coverage partner?
• What is the expected turnaround for standard coverage review, and how are urgent reviews (claim deadlines, ROR-letter timing) handled?
• Is there a formal sign-off step before any coverage opinion, ROR letter, or denial letter is delivered?

Record answers. Mark any unanswered item [CONFIRM: review requirement not yet specified].

Stage 8 — Prohibited Assumptions

Ask the interviewee:

• Are there facts agents must never assume without explicit confirmation — that coverage exists, that a duty to defend is owed, that bad faith does not apply, that subrogation is preserved, that an additional-insured certificate is current?
• Are there insurance-specific risks — bad faith, coverage waiver, late notice, anti-stacking, anti-subrogation rules — where an agent must stop and escalate rather than reason through independently?
• Are there matter types where agents must never proceed beyond intake without direct attorney involvement — coverage opinions, ROR letters, settlement authority, declaratory-judgment actions?
• Are there prior incidents — bad-faith judgments, market-conduct findings — that should be encoded as explicit prohibitions for agents working on insurance matters?

Record answers. Mark any unanswered item [CONFIRM: prohibited assumption not yet specified].

Stage 9 — Assemble the Draft Profile

Compile all answers into a filled draft of practice-profiles/insurance.md, populating each of the eight profile sections. For every item that was not answered, insert a visible [CONFIRM: ...] placeholder with enough context for the reviewer to understand what needs to be supplied. Append a list of all open placeholders so the reviewing attorney can see at a glance what remains unresolved.

Output Format

Deliver:

1. Filled draft of practice-profiles/insurance.md — all eight sections populated with answers from the interview. Every unanswered item is a visible [CONFIRM: ...] placeholder.
2. Open-items list — an explicit enumeration of every placeholder inserted, with the stage and question it corresponds to, so the reviewing attorney can resolve them efficiently.

Label the entire output: Draft legal work product for attorney review. Not legal advice. This profile draft must be reviewed and approved by the supervising attorney or practice group before it is relied upon.

Attorney Verification Checklist

• All eight profile sections have been reviewed by a supervising attorney or authorized practice-group representative.
• Jurisdiction coverage — including bad-faith law and direct-action statutes — is accurately recorded [verify jurisdiction].
• Coverage-opinion framework reflects the group's current considered posture [ATTORNEY TO CONFIRM].
• ROR letter template references are current and any related notice deadlines are marked [deadline verification required].
• Bad-faith risk-assessment framework reflects current law in in-scope jurisdictions [Verify current law].
• Subrogation and additional-insured defaults are current.
• No client-specific facts, matter identifiers, or privileged details appear in the profile.
• All [CONFIRM: ...] placeholders have been resolved or explicitly accepted as pending.
• The approved profile has been saved to practice-profiles/insurance.md and its effective date recorded.
• A process for periodic profile review and update has been identified.