Stuart Hill

Stuart founded Wynterhill and since its inception has attracted matters that clients regard as commercially significant and/or legally difficult.

He is frequently contacted in circumstances where a client or broker cannot see a legal answer to the position taken by their insurers and, more often than not, he finds a way through. He balances commercial sense with legal expertise: many of the cases in which he is involved are resolved without the client needing to instruct counsel, even though insurers have representation at KC level. Unsurprisingly, therefore, he is the only one of the twenty plus contributing authors to “Company Directors: Duties, Liabilities and Remedies” (Oxford University Press, now in its fourth edition) who is not a barrister. He writes the chapter on Directors and Officers Liability Insurance.

Stuart is particularly valued by clients for getting quickly to the issue on which a dispute will turn and then for driving early resolution. Any idiot can take a case to trial, and success thereat is really down to counsel not their instructing solicitors. True value (particularly for policyholders whose resources are dwarfed by those of their insurers) lies in getting the right result without too much risk or cost to the policyholder.

Stuart’s recent work at Wynterhill has included the following issues: cover under insurance policies for regulator fines; insurance wordings for financial institutions and D&O cover; questions of the timing of notifications to liability policies; recovery of unexpected expenditures when take-up of a sales promotion exceeds expectations; professional liability issues arising out of a variety of infrastructure projects; D&O insurance for “outside entity” roles; and, the inevitable stream of Covid-related Business Interruption losses.

In 30 years in practice in insurance matters there is very little that Stuart hasn’t seen, said something about, or sorted.