One of the biggest challenges in a property subrogation case is time. Insurance companies need to get on the site right away. The earlier you’re involved the better. The best practice is to get out to that loss site while the fire is still smoldering if you can, it’s really that quickly. The earlier the better because witnesses’ memories they fade with time. The more you can gather information right off the bat, the better. You can interview witnesses, you can interview the policy holder, you can find the artifacts and the evidence that need to be preserved certainly with time the chance that artifacts or evidence disappears increases. And so, getting to the loss site as quickly as possible is the best practice.

Another important thing that you should consider in any loss is spoliation. Spoliation is a claim, more or less a defense that can be raised by a third party who you are pursuing. And that third party can argue that you as the subrogating carrier did not preserve the evidence or preserve the scene or allow that party an opportunity to investigate the loss. So it’s important that you put these parties on notice, allow them an opportunity to come to the loss site to do their own investigation, and to agree upon the artifacts that will be preserved.

So for example, in a product defect case you might have one particular component of the product that it caused the fire. And so, the question is how much do you need to keep? What should you retain? Certainly, as the party responsible for coordinating the loss site inspection our experts will have an opinion on what they want to preserve and the third parties may have an opinion on what they want to keep. And so there needs to be a discussion about what is retained, what is preserved, and can we narrow down the focus so we don’t need to take everything from the loss site to make it manageable.