Once a month, I open an envelope from the NationalUnderwriter Company and out drops a hundred or more pages ofadditions, updates, and replacements for my nine volumes ofFire Casualty & Surety Bulletins. It takes me abouthalf an hour to sort the pages, figure out what to keep and what todiscard, and re-stack the books in my insurance library.

National Underwriter keeps reminding me that I could get theFC&S Bulletinson a monthly disk, but in my line ofwork, writing and editing insurance courses and textbooks, thatwould be counterproductive. I would need a second computer to seewhat was new or different on the disk while I tried to write areasonable explanation of it in the text. One computer isenough.

It also amazes me how many changes the FC&SBulletins report each month. Anyone who handles a variety ofclaims must know this stuff. As should be evident from myoccasional columns on court cases, every word in a policy issubject to court interpretation. Try settling claims on an outdatedconcept of insurance, and the adjuster will be in deep trouble.Each month the Insurance Services Office Inc., the AmericanAssociation of Insurance Services, The Surety Association ofAmerica, and all the individual insurance companies constantlyupdate or modify their coverages to comply with new circumstancesor court rulings. In addition, some states, like Texas, mandatecertain policy language. About the only policy-issuing agency thatrarely changes its form is the National Council on CompensationInsurance. The last major change I recall was in the 1991 form,when NCCI changed Workman's Compensation to Workers Compensation(absent the apostrophe).

In 2012, everything seems to have been computerized. I can readthe latest issue of Claims Magazine online evenbefore my hard copy arrives by the USPS snail mail. My “Take Note”monthly blog—sent out by the Crawford & Co. EducationalServices—can only be seen online, and the same is true of thecompany's KMC on Demand courses, which I helped write. Myother publisher, Thomson Reuters West, has one of my textsavailable to online subscribers of Westlaw, but it is alsoavailable in print for nonsubscribers. My other Thomson ReutersWest texts are only available in print, but they are updated onceor twice a year to keep up with all the new court decisions andpolicy changes that can affect even the simplest of claims.

Keeping Up-to-Date
Want to know what ishappening in the property & casualty insurance coverage world?Get the three-volume Casualty Insurance Claims – 4thEdition, which is updated twice a year. Work in therisk-management field? You need the two-volume Excess Liability– Rights and Duties of Commercial Risk Insureds and Insurers,4th Edition, which is updated annually. Perhaps you arecurious about how to figure out coverage for a natural or man-madedisaster? Purchase the relatively new volume, CAT Claims –Insurance Coverage for Natural and Man-Made Disasters, FirstEdition. I'm only a contributing author to that one, but asthe last two years have shown, natural disasters—ranging fromdrought and forest fires to solar storms and tsunamis—can createquite a bit of havoc. (See www.thomson.com for details about thistext.)

Lots of Competition
Sometime this month,Thomson Reuters West will issue the 8th edition of a big 900+ page“handbook” titled Casualty, Fire & Marine InvestigationChecklists. It is a field guide for property & casualtyadjusters, covering everything from policy disputes to fraud,similar in organization to the three-volume Casualty InsuranceClaims 4th but without all the specific references to policywording and court interpretations. Assigned an entomology claim?This text provides a step-by-step investigative outline. How abouta sidewalk falldown claim, or a latex allergy or food contaminationclaim?

There are more than a hundred individual types of claims withspecific investigation instructions in just the premises,operations, and products areas alone designed to keep the adjusterout of trouble and cover every potential aspect of the claim. Inmore than 30 chapters, ranging from detailed investigation ofinjury claims and types of injuries to rules for evidence discoverywhile preventing spoliation, the book is a one-volume adjusters'claims manual. Got all that on your computer that you carry withyou and reference regularly? Perhaps, but is it as detailed orcurrent? Does it cover nanoparticals liability claims?

National Underwriter Company also publishes a vast library ofinsurance coverage and specific topic texts. Need an update on yourCEUs for ethics? Try NU's Winning by the Rules – Ethics andSuccess in the Insurance Profession, 2nd Ed. There is even anonline course to go with it that will get you the credit hours youneed. Former Claims columnist and frequentClaims/National Underwriter contributor Kevin Quinley alsohas several books out there to assist the adjuster or risk manager,published by National Underwriter Co. There areprobably other insurance publishers with similar texts or computerprograms offering assistance to adjusters. Thomson Reuters West,which is primarily in the law book publishing business along withall their other services, has lots of competition, including LexisNexis. There are also competing books for the plaintiff bar tostudy.

History of the Checklists
When the formerClaims (which was then known as InsuranceAdjuster) Magazine columnist Pat Magarick, L.LM.,retired – having written his monthly “P.M. Letter” for decades – hewas already well-known in the insurance-education field. CentralBook Co. of New York had published Pat's first edition of CheckLists in 1955, when he was the claims manager forManufacturer's Casualty Ins. Co. He later became claims vicepresident for AIU. The spiral-bound book consisted of 250 pages,plus an index. The same year Prentice-Hall Inc. published the firstedition of Successful Handling of Casualty Claims, asingle volume of less than 500 pages. In 1974, Clark Boardman Co.,a Rochester, N.Y., affiliate of the Lawyers Publishing Co., boughtthe publishing right to Successful Handling, although Patstill held the copyright. Clark Boardman also took overChecklists, publishing the third edition in 1975. ClarkBoardman, a Thomson Company, also took over West Group (and a fewyears ago also Reuters News Service, as the company was a publisherof newspapers and other media.)

In 1978, I acquired B. David Hinkle's “Justin Adjuster” columnin Insurance Adjuster Magazine. When Pat retired in theearly 1990s, by then well over the age of 80, he asked me to takeover his three textbooks, which by then also included ExcessLiability, primarily a text on avoiding bad faith claims. Myfirst adventure into this legal publishing world was the fourthedition of Casualty Investigation Checklists in1994. Until Pat died a few years later, I simply updated and addedto his third editions of Casualty Insurance Claims andExcess Liability. By that time, however, the West Groupand Clark Boardman Callaghan merger had produced a number of othertexts on bad faith, and Excess was, indeed, excess. With anew attorney contributor, J. Robert Persons, Excess wasconverted to a risk management-targeted text and broken into twovolumes updated annually. It contains court cases that impact ontypical corporate insurance plans that many chief risk officersnever seem to get around to understanding, but also featuresalternative risk financing mechanisms, which led to my articles inthe American Bar Association Tort & Insurance Section TheBrief, and West's Insurance Litigation Reporter onmanaging litigation for a self-funding commercial entity.

Excess has been entirely rewritten, with only a fewremaining mentions of Pat and his comments; about ten years ago, asindividual chapters of the new edition of Casualty InsuranceClaims, 4th, were being rewritten, chapters on ocean andinland marine insurance, property coverages, indirect loss, lifeand health insurance overlapped with casualty coverages, and newperils, such as terrorism, were added. Only a very few portions ofPat's original text remain, and those have been constantly updatedin the semi-annual supplements.

Textbook Education Versus ComputerizedEducation
As an old foggy no longer involved in theday-to-day handling of claims (I tried it a year or so ago as atemporary employee at a small auto insurance firm and, stuck behindtwo separate computers into which all the work was placed, hatedit), I have never-the-less become involved in both printed andcomputerized claims education. Which is better? I grew up ontextbooks. The only real computer around when I was in universitywas Univac, although some IBM computerized gizmo did punch outlittle green cards for the registration process each semester.Registration still gives me nightmares. Students in the late 1950sand early 1960s spent their time at the library, researching theirpapers. As I was then working at Dow Jones, running a bank ofteletype machines, print media and the early days of television wasall there was. The year I took the CPCU exams (there were fivefour-hour exams over two and a half days) learning was all fromtextbooks and those FC&S Bulletins. I don't know whatthey study now, although I did write part of one of their texts forCPCU 5.

Today both libraries and newspapers are closing. Books are readon little machines that are carried around. People get their newsfrom cable TV or the Internet, and we wonder just how accurate itreally is. (Of course, considering the “yellow journalism” of someof the Hearst and other papers in the 1920s, and the recentscandals of News Corp and the Murdochs, perhaps news was just asbiased back then.) What did strike me as interesting was a recentstudy by the New York Times in which they discovered thatthose who read their newspaper in its print edition had betterrecall of what the news was than those who read the Internetedition.

I must grant that schools such as MIT, Harvard, Stanford, andsimilar world-class universities provide a superior education; thatis why a good percentage of their student body consists offoreigners who will either remain in the U.S. to take the highlytechnical jobs or return home to Asia to compete with us.For-profit colleges advertise great education and a good jobafterward, but all they seem to do is create student loan debt.Knowing several professors at local state universities, they tellme that the college students of today are coming out of high schooltotally unprepared for any advanced education. They cannot write agrammatical sentence; can't spell beyond five-letter words(although they all know the shorthand for texting); they don't knowhow to conduct research for a paper; and they reject the idea ofreading any sort of textbook. Hence many colleges and universitieshave gone to computerized educational courses, about the only waythey know how to deal with the current generation of students.

Education in the Global Context
Virtuallyevery Asian and European nation is ahead of the U.S. in basiceducation, including math and science. I've heard that subjectssuch as geography or social sciences are not even taught insecondary schools any longer. Johnny and Jane can't find their wayto the bathroom without a GPS or someone texting them theinstructions. Watching “Are You Smarter than a Fifth Grader” on TVis revealing. Asked what states border Utah, a contestant said“Dahh, I don't know. Alaska? Ohio?” Is it any wonder theunemployment rate is around 8 percent nationally, and far higher inother areas? The typical American can't qualify for the typicallow-tech job, if such jobs were available, let alone the manyhigh-tech jobs that are available. Of course, if they arecollecting unemployment benefits, they don't want a low-paying jobanyway.

Knowing how to text might have been helpful a century ago whenrailroad telegraphers used code to transmit dispatcherinstructions: “WB 7 Eng 248 meet EB 12 Eng 1102 at MP 402. 7 sup.”In real language, westbound train No. 7, with engine 248 was tomeet eastbound train 12 with engine 1102 at milepost 402 and takethe siding as 7 was superior. But the telegraphers, usually stationagents, had to know Morse Code and how to type, as such a messagewould be typed (with all the words) in triplicate: one for theengineer, to be hooped up as Number 7 blew past the station;another for the conductor on the caboose; and a third for therecord book. It had to be accurate or Number 7, probably apassenger train, would collide head-on with Number 12 somewhereabout ten miles west of milepost 402. Thomas A. Edison got hisstart as a teenager as a railway telegrapher. Would you trust yourneighbor's kid with such a responsibility – sort of like an FAA airtraffic controller – today?

So, I would vote for throwing out the laptops and bringing backthe pen, paper, and typewriter, restoring the faithful andup-to-date textbook to its rightful place. But this is the 21stcentury, and the old street adjusters that learned from thosetextbooks and used paper and pen are now retired or about toretire, and where our industry will find their replacements remainsto be seen. Hence this old fuddy-duddy will continue to contributeto both means of claims education and pray for the best.