Past NAPIA President Harvey Goodman, picked up another well-deserved accolade by his colleagues by being named 2015 NAPIA Man of the Year. I ran a quick legal search on Goodman and found this brief explanation of his qualifications in a Hurricane Katrina expert report:1

Harvey M, Goodman, SPPA, President of GGG/AI, has been assisting the insured for over 30 years and is a licensed public adjuster in numerous states, including Louisiana and Mississippi. Harvey has been the Engagement Partner for many sizable claims including Beaulieu of America, Federal Realty Investment Trust, Four Times Square, Malden Mills, Marriott Warner Center, New York Palace Hotel, Meristar Hotels, Court Square Center, Bayou Jubilee Casino and Morgan Stanley/Pyramid Advisors. Harvey has presented workshops to the Risk and Insurance Management Society (RIMS) Annual Conference on several occasions. He has also spoken to the International Risk Management Institute (IRMI) Annual Construction Risk Conference, PRISM, PRIMA, the Annual Windstorm Insurance Conference and the National Press Club.

His website adds more:

Mr. Goodman is a past President of the National Association of Public Insurance Adjusters (NAPIA), is currently a board member of Eagle Bancorp (a NASDAQ listed company) and is a past director of Adjusters International. He has presented lectures on builders risk/course of construction loss adjustments, large multi-layered loss adjustments, and boiler & machinery loss adjustments to the Risk and Insurance Management Society (RIMS) on five occasions, and has presented to the Hospitality Law Conference, the American Bar Association (ABA) Tort Trial & Insurance Practice Section/Property Insurance Law Committee’s Annual Spring CLE Meeting, the First Party Claims Conference, the Annual Windstorm Conference, the National League of Cities-Risk Information Sharing Consortium (NLC-RISC) and to many other groups. Harvey has provided expert witness testimony and/or been deposed in numerous cases.

Harvey is the author of the Adjusting Today articles, “Proving an Insured Loss: Policyholders Need Experts too” and “Contingent Business Interruption Issues Continue Following Disasters in Japan.” He has taught seminars on insurance to business leaders and insurance agents, as well as been a guest lecturer on property insurance at the University of Maryland.

In his article, Proving an Insured Loss: Policyholders Need Experts Too, Goodman highlights why there is a historical reason for the need of policyholders to hire experts and public adjusters to help value the amount of a loss:

There was a time when property losses were settled quickly by experienced independent general adjusters who had sufficient authority to evaluate conditions using few, if any, outside experts. As the insurance industry evolved in the 1970s and 1980s, carriers began to use more and more outside specialists — including forensic accountants, engineers, contractors, testing laboratories, and so forth — to work with their own adjusters in evaluating a claim. Many factors contributed to this evolution, not the least of which was the carriers’ desire to manage claim settlements using a centralized structure with claim-approval authority residing at the home office and not in the field.

To regain parity, insureds today find it increasingly important to employ their own outside consultants to help document and expedite their claims if they are to obtain a satisfactory claim recovery and restore their business operations as quickly and completely as possible. Consequently, the use of experts — including accountants, engineers and public adjusters — has become a common procedure in property damage loss settlements….

If a young public adjuster wanted to aspire to be as good a public adjuster as anybody, Harvey Goodman would be a fantastic choice to use as a model.

Positive Thought For The Day

“The three great essentials to achieve anything worthwhile are, first, hard work; second, stick-to-itiveness; third, common sense.”
              —Thomas A. Edison

1 WMS Industries v. Federal Ins. Co., No. 06CV00977, 2007 WL 5280289 (S.D.Miss. 2007).