Colleen Murphy

Practice Areas

Global Insurance Services

Management and Professional Liability

Professional Liability – E&O

Insurance Regulatory

Career

As a leader of Goldberg Segalla’s insurance regulatory team, Colleen Murphy taps into her deep insurance regulatory experience to successfully handle domestic and international insurance and reinsurance regulatory issues and transactions. Representative transactions include leading the team that helped Mitsui Sumitomo close a $350 million cross-border Insurtech acquisition.

A significant part of Colleen’s practice includes representing insurers, insurance agents and brokers, excess and surplus lines brokers – both life, accident and health, and property and casualty – managing general agents (MGAs) and managing general underwriters (MGUs), third party administrators, and independent adjusters, in insurance regulatory enforcement and licensing matters as well as consumer complaints, in state insurance departments across the country. She also represents brokers before FINRA, where she has successfully expunged records and favorably resolved enforcement actions.

Over the past 25 years, Colleen has represented hundreds of retail and wholesale insurance agents and brokers, MGAs, and MGUs in complex matters, and brings a deep understanding of their business concerns, the regulatory climate surrounding the industry, their errors and omissions (E&O) risks, and the contractual agreements and relationships with their carriers and insureds. Her longstanding winning track record includes proven results in court, mediation, and alternative dispute resolution. She has taken the lead role in joint defense groups in complex multi-party litigation.

Colleen has performed independent internal insurance investigations, loss control audits, rewritten agency contracts, and gone to bat for agents and brokers’ insureds in contentious coverage disputes. Her clients rely on her to provide strategic counsel on risk management, E&O loss control, regulatory matters, operational issues, and other big picture issues affecting their businesses. As a nationally recognized authority on the defense of insurance agents and brokers in E&O lawsuits, Colleen has been called on to successfully defend these clients in hundreds of E&O lawsuits in numerous states in addition to New York where she is admitted to practice, including California, Connecticut, Illinois, Maine, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia.

Colleen also represents insurance agents, brokers, MGAs, and MGUs in a wide range of transactional matters, with a focus on the formation and structuring of insurance agencies and related entities. Her practice includes advising clients on the purchase and sale of insurance agencies and MGAs/MGUs through stock and asset acquisitions, mergers and acquisitions, and the sale and acquisition of books of business – drafting and negotiating the agreements and conducting due diligence. Colleen also negotiates and drafts key commercial agreements such as commission-sharing and referral fee arrangements, renewal rights agreements, producer agreements and other distribution contracts, non-compete/non-solicit agreements, and service agreements/consulting agreements, helping clients navigate both the legal and business considerations involved in building and scaling their insurance operations.

In addition to her insurance agents and brokers defense, regulatory practice, and transactional practice, Colleen focuses on the defense of a range of professionals in malpractice and other liability claims. She has successfully defended clients including third-party administrators, trust administrators, independent adjusters, engineers, financial professionals, accountants, IRS enrolled agents (EA), tax preparers, real estate agents and brokers, attorneys, and miscellaneous professionals.

Colleen’s expertise is frequently called on in complex insurance coverage and bad faith litigation across the country. She has worked extensively alongside Thomas Segalla, author of the renowned insurance law treatise Couch on Insurance 3d, on numerous matters in which he was retained as a bad faith and insurance coverage expert by major insurance carriers and policyholders in jurisdictions across the United States. Colleen also counsels and defends clients including sureties, stop loss insurers, plan administrators, insurance agents and brokers, and trustees in the context of civil litigation, arbitrations, and regulatory actions arising out of all forms of self-funded health plans, under ERISA as well as municipal self-funded plans.

Contact Colleen at [email protected]

Professional Memberships

Independent Insurance Agents and Brokers of America, Agents Counsel for Technology: Attorney Member

DRI – Defense Research Institute, Professional Liability Committee

Women’s Bar Association of the State of New York, Western New York Chapter

Publications

“Bad Faith as a Continuum,” Co-Author, LexisNexis, December 2025

“Dissecting a Prominent #MeToo Securities Case,” Professional Liability Magazine, Winter 2020

“Exhibit A – Against an Agency in E&O Lawsuits,” Professional Liability Magazine, Winter 2020

“A Word to the Wise for Insurance Agents and Brokers Who Are Asked to Hold Off on Reporting Claims: There’s Danger in Delay,” Professional Liability Magazine, Summer 2020

Education

Awards