[MUSIC] So now even a college athlete, there's a putative or class action by college athletes, you didn't warn me about the risks playing college football. The Arrington class action. Should a college athlete have disability protection against concussion, possible concussion injuries while he's playing college football? >> Absolutely. I think it's, again it's educating either the college player or semi-pro or professional player. Unfortunately it's a matter of here's what we have, here are the options, here's what's necessary for you. But whether they take it or not it's going to be up to them or their advisor. Unfortunately, as we said earlier, we see more and more case where they're saying it's not going to happen to me, I'll be fine. I'm not going to pay money for something I can't drive home or play with or feel. >> Okay, and we know the leagues and the conferences have options for the pre-professional and the professional athlete. >> Correct. >> Why, why do you need this excess umbrella coverage? Again, across the board, whatever sport we may be talking about. >> Sure. Unfortunately, Peter's become a necessary evil, an excess liability policy on your home and your auto or your tenants or your condominium policy are primary liability. The excess liability, or the umbrella, it's called an umbrella because it looks like an umbrella that shapes over of your possessions obviously. Texas umbrella will be something like a 1, 2 or $5 million umbrella. Unfortunately as we become a social media, become more high profile with all of our athletes, if they're involved in an accident and they're involved in a law suit that excess liability pro- policy provides much better protections than simply not having it at all. And again we see a number of cases where, as I mentioned earlier, I have one client worth $300 to $400 million, and has a $1 million umbrella policy. So if he or his family were involved in any sort of accident, and there's an injury or permanent disability or even a permanent, partial disability, that athlete can literally lose everything he has from a personal wealth standpoint. >> There was the famous case last year of a now Cleveland Brown, who was trying to catch a pizza when he was playing for the Lions. >> Right. >> And he got into an accident and couldn't play. >> Right. >> Is that an insurable event? >> Yeah, I mean, that'd be covered under his automobile policy insurance, obviously, sure. >> Okay, and let's take him and go forward what happens when you have, not him, let's take another receiver for the Browns. When he has kind of a falling down episode, again public like Davone Bess, just can't even finish his contract, can't play, has all sorts of issues with the league. Can anything be done to protect a player like that? >> Again, not to be vague in the answer Peter, but unfortunately a lot of it depends on the circumstances. No insurance policy's going to cover everything for every athlete. If you have an intentional act for example, that's not going to be covered under any insurance policy. However, again, back to educating our clients, which is something we take great pride in, it's important to let clients know, here's what you're covered for, but just as importantly, what you're not covered for. It goes to our behavior. You know, we've get approached a number of times by very, let's say, clients that don't have the best profile, if you will. And people say well why would you want to insure them? Well I think it's even more important to insure them because when you're insuring them, the premiums are a lot higher, obviously. But you're also educating them to let them know what the risks are involved by your behavior. Because now it costs you money. Because you're costing that much more for insurance, so your behavior does affect your financial well being as well. And we found that to be, to agents and advisors to be very receptive of that, because they can go back to their client and say, this is costing you money by your behavior. When you're tweeting certain things out, when you're behaving poorly at a bar, get into a bar fight, less insurance carriers want to insure someone like that, so the carriers that were willing to do that will charge you a lot more premium for that. And, they have no where else to go, but they still need that coverage. >> Is it safe to say your going to get coverage, a declination of coverage for intentional misconduct? >> Correct. >> Just generally. >> Yes. >> Like. >> Intention, any intentional act is not covered by insurance. >> And same, just so the audience is clear for any criminal activity. >> Correct. >> Can't insure against that. >> Correct. >> That would be against public policy. >> Correct. >> So that you have to advise your clients of that limit as well. >> Correct. >> But as an athlete, let's take the individual sports like golf, tennis player, is retired, going into a broadcasting career, perhaps playing modeling career in James' case, perhaps. Maybe playing the senior tour, then do you sort of contour the coverages Jim, so that there's really less to protect against on court earnings and more to protect off court? >> Great question. Absolutely, Peter. What we do again, it's part of our annual review of all of our clients, we look at the exposures, if you're an athlete heading to retire or about to retire we say, okay he's no longer had his foundation, for example, so that exposure is gone. He's cutting back on his personal appearances. He's cutting back on his charity events, things like that. So we may have a client with say a $10 million umbrella and the agent advisor will say, you know, we want to cut costs somewhere but we don't want to cut back on coverages. Okay, we can go from a ten to five if you like, because here we think we just said that one over, very high profile basketball players recently retire to where the advisor called me and said, you know what, he's not doing the foundation work anymore, he's going to kind of lay low for a couple years and go from there. So we lowered his umbrella. Now, the flip side is that they make sure they sign off on that to understand that you're lowering your coverages with us. And again, I don't necessarily recommend that. And I also tell people, it's easier to keep an umbrella than to get one. So let's say he wants to increase in a couple years but has a couple of speeding tickets or a couple of off-field incidences, after he retires it's hard to get that coverage back. So again educating our clients to understand, you can reduce your coverages but if you decide to do something down the road, it may not be easy to get that coverage back up to that again. >> Let's finish by talking about the imponderable of our mortality. How important is nobody likes to talk about it but the conversation is what about life insurance? How do you factor that into the portfolio protection? >> Again, it's part of our overall review in terms of the insurance with the disability, the home and the auto, their appearances, things like that but life insurance obviously something that comes up, as we all know nobody likes to discuss it. But part of what we do again is educating that client in terms of, you may not want to look this far down the road, but that's what we're here to do. As I mentioned earlier, part of the financial portfolio is the insurance side of it. And, unfortunately, we find many cases where advisors or sports agents simply don't look at insurance as part of the financial portfolio much like the life insurance as part of that as well. >> Is there an age by which you would say you must have life insurance or should even we've interviewed met with Clint Frazier, brand new 19-year-old player for the Indians' affiliate Lake County Captains. Should somebody like that have life insurance? >> Yes, absolutely. Especially with, with some one like Clint for example who doesn't have that guaranteed contract yet. Hopefully he will, obviously he's a top five prospect obviously in the Indians organization. On the same token it's a matter of helping someone who's 19, 20 years old understand that this is something you want to look at. Obviously the costs are much more easier to take on rather then waiting till you're 30 or 40 years old. So, it is something we bring up, I will tell you it's often declined. Simply because they'll say, oh, we'll do it in a couple of years or what have you, but again, what we try to emphasize to our financial partners is this is something you need to at least offer your client. Again, if you don't offer it, how do they know that they can at least have this as an option. And I think that's an obligation financial advisors need to have. What we get a lot of times is when we talk to financial advisors say we don't even talk even talk about insurance because I don't have someone I can really work with and trust. If I screw something up with one of my financial partners I lose nothing. They can lose that and all those relationships from them. And that's something that's very real. So we talk about life insurance, disability insurance, it's an obligation for these financial partners to bring those up to these clients. If they decide to decline it that's fine. But they're aware it's available to them down the road. >> Finished, yeah, your colleague Janie is here. Pool parties, I never even thought of that. >> [LAUGH]. >> Bad things can happen at pool parties, I mean there was the terrible, terrible situation that Jack Nicklaus lost a grandchild. in a pool terrible incident, how do you protect your athletes against something like that, God forbid? >> Yeah, and this comes up a lot, Peter. We bring it up to all of our advisors and our clients in terms of, let us know what you're doing, and I've more agents tell me like, yeah he had a birthday party his 30th birthday party, 25th birthday, so where was it? He rented out a home, and he bought a pool, or he rented out a bar, or a nightclub. Those are exposures that agents and advisors just don't think about when they're thinking about their clients. And so that's a great example. Whereas if you have a pool party, or you're charging some fans to come in selling tickets, that can be a commercial exposure, and it may not be covered under your personal insurance. And everybody assumes it simply is, and we're fortunate to have someone, my Associate Director Jaime Mennerich who specializes in doing anything that comes off of that athlete's personal insurance risks. So if it's a personal appearance, a public appearance, their foundations, their shell corporations, we also insure team owners and teams and for an office personnel and coach, because unfortunately, they have the same exposures as the players do know. >> Let's finish with a real life example that's happening now. I don't, maybe you do represent it, but a Ray Rice situation. We all know what happened there. Potential criminal assault, no charges dropped. >> Correct. >> Could that, would that be covered under a policy that you would have placed for a Ray Rice type situation? >> Again, in the case and what I know about the case is that would be an intention considered an intentional acts so that wouldn't be covered for that. Now, however, going forward on him, it would be next to impossible for him to get a standard insurance coverage. So the coverage that he has now more than likely will be dropped at the renewal. And he'll have to go to what's called a excess-surplus market, which is a lack of better term, a non-standard market that handles high profile people with poor, poor behavioral patterns and things like that. So like I said earlier, that's a good example of someone that's going to have a very difficult time getting proper coverage down the road. >> It's been a great encyclopedic look at the world of protecting the pre-professional, professional athletes through and including his or her amateur years, through and including his mature years and his retirement years. We really want to thank Jim for being with us today. We couldn't have had a better expert in this area Jim, thank you so much. >> Thank you Peter, appreciate it. >> Okay. >> Thanks. >> Thank you. [MUSIC]
