About

Charley Barr was a commercial casualty underwriter before becoming a lawyer and earning his CPCU designation. He has practiced exclusively in-house at insurers, reinsurers, brokers and derivatives dealers. He was General Counsel for over 25 years at several property-casualty and life-annuity re/insurers - including General Re, XL Capital, General Accident and Ariel Reinsurance. Eleven of those years were at publicly-held companies. He has maintained an arbitration and expert witness practice since 2010.

As a hands-on lawyer, manager and mentor, he has mastered financial condition and holding company management at US re/insurers with international platforms as well as having transacted numerous reinsurance, managing general underwriter and program manager deals. He supervised the formation, licensing, purchase and sale of several insurers, reinsurers and producers, including the sale of General Re to Berkshire Hathaway and many domestic and international acquisitions and integrations by General Re and XL Capital.

He specializes in complex transactions combining re/insurance, securities and investment funds including ILS structures and collateralized reinsurance. He underwrote casualty policies and has arbitrated premium collection actions involving paid-loss retrospective plans and high deductible programs. He was involved quite early with captives established in Bermuda and the variety of fronting arrangements used for captives as well as conventional ones involving the retiring program insurer continuing until the replacement insurer has attained state licensing or necessary rate and form approvals.

Another specialty is the licensing of re/insurers and brokers and having a keen knowledge of the architecture of complex reinsurance structures as well as stop-loss re/insurance programs for self-insuring medical coverages.

He has considerable regulatory experience ranging from traditional holding company structures and approvals, change in control transactions, prior approvals of ownership, dividending or investment law issues as well troubleshooting when things go awry. While at Reliance Insurance he unwound a livery-vehicle fraud involving rate and form violations and unlicensed persons acting as insurers. At General Re his team unwound the Unicover Managers debacle involving Workers’ Compensation carve-out policies and loss-laden reinsurance to naive life reinsurers. At XL Capital, he defended the group against investigations by the NY Attorney General, SEC and DOJ involving major industry participants involving contingent commissions, fictitious quotes, lack of risk transfer and offshore reinsurance structures and the follow-on class actions by harmed parties that were joined by regulators.