From helping to win coverage for thousands of asbestos-related claims to ensuring a city was fully covered for a settlement with a man wrongly convicted of murder, Anderson Kill PC's wide variety of work on behalf of policyholders has earned it a spot on Law360's Insurance Practice Groups of the Year.

The firm, joining the list for the second year in a row, focuses its insurance practice on insurance recovery for policyholders, with about 65 attorneys dedicated solely to the practice, likely making it the largest insurance recovery group in the world — something the firm is very proud of, group co-chair Robert Horkovich told Law360. Anderson Kill doesn't take business from insurers, enabling it to pursue "any and all" claims against the industry on behalf of policyholder clients, unburdened by conflicts of interest that often occur in larger firms, according to the co-chair.

"This is what we do — we go after the insurance industry, we eschew representation of the insurance industry," Horkovich said. "We're able to represent clients zealously in pushing the envelope against the insurance industry, which larger firms ... can't do."

This zealous representation has enabled the firm to help its clients recover billions of dollars since its 1969 inception, and while its reputation precedes it — something which brings in clients seeking the firm's help — it also actively identifies potential clients and ongoing legal issues or cases where it can provide guidance to courts on issues important to its clients, Horkovich said.

Anderson Kill also maintains database of thousands of documents encompassing its previous work, legal decisions, data from and related to the insurance industry and depositions from cases — a collection which grows each year — putting it on strong footing at the start of every case, according to the co-chair. "Our founder, Eugene Anderson, understood that if we [were] to attack the insurance industry, we needed to marshal the resources to do so," Horkovich said.

As such, the firm continued to help its clients win successful outcomes in a number of notable cases over the past year, including several related to coverage for asbestos-related claims, such as a ruling in a dispute between engineering equipment manufacturer Alfa Laval Inc. and its insurers.After previously winning a partial summary judgment in a New York state court case on the insurers' duty to defend Alfa Laval in about 1,300 underlying asbestos suits and seeing the decision upheld on appeal, the judgment was further extended in July to cover all underlying cases. In August, the firm then helped the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey win a ruling that American International Group Inc. unit American Home Assurance Co. has a duty to defend the Port Authority in underlying litigation over asbestos claims related to the construction of the original World Trade Center. Further, in October it represented Coca-Cola Co. unit Cleaver-Brooks Inc. in a Wisconsin Court of Appeals case upholding a decision that three insurers owed the boiler manufacturer simultaneous — rather than sequential — coverage for more than 200,000 underlying asbestos suits under excess coverage policies, a ruling worth some $60 million in defense and indemnity costs to the company. Anderson Kill's work, however, didn't stop at asbestos-related cases.

In July, the firm won a state court ruling for the state of California that a $99.4 million settlement payment to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency for the cleanup of the Stringfellow Acid Pits Superfund site counted as coverable damages under its insurance policies, after previously helping the state achieve a landmark 2012 decision in the California Supreme Court that enabled it to stack its available policies and maximize coverage for the costs of the massive cleanup. Among many other cases, it also assisted the city of Peekskill, N.Y., win coverage for the entirety — barring deductibles — of a $5.4 million settlement with Jeffrey Deskovic, exonerated after 16 years in prison on a murder charge, after the city's insurers had previously argued that it was only covered for the year in which the conviction occurred, not across Deskovic's entire imprisonment. As 2014 begins, the firm continues to work diligently on cases for policyholder clients, including a number of ongoing asbestos coverage cases, Horkovich told Law360, noting that he had been working very hard recently as the long-running bankruptcy of manufacturer W.R. Grace & Co. comes to an end, helping to secure $650 million of insurance coverage to move from the company to an asbestos trust.