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Thomas F. Segalla Earns Lifetime Honor From World’s Largest Defense Bar Organization

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Thomas F. Segalla Earns Lifetime Honor From World’s Largest Defense Bar Organization

October 6, 2017
Thomas F. Segalla

Thomas F. Segalla, one of Goldberg Segalla’s founding partners and past co-chair of its Global Insurance Services Practice Group, was honored on October 5 at the Annual Meeting of the Defense Research Institute (DRI) with the organization’s esteemed Louis B. Potter Lifetime Professional Service Award. DRI, also known as “The Voice of the Defense Bar,” is the leading organization of defense attorneys and in-house counsel nationally and internationally. The organization’s Louis B. Potter Award “honors an individual who exemplifies the highest professionalism and service to the legal profession.”

Tom, a nationally celebrated attorney and a leader both in his profession and his community, has been a member of DRI for 37 years. In that time, he has served the organization as a member of its Board of Directors, as chair of the Law Institute, and as board liaison to the Insurance Law Committee. He currently serves on the DRI Publications Board and Barristers Task Force. In addition, the organization in 2013 established a permanent Tom Segalla Chair of the DRI Law Institute, as well as the Tom Segalla Excellence in Education Award, both honors that pay homage to Tom’s dedication to DRI and to raising the standards of excellence and ethics in the legal profession.

Beyond his service to DRI and to the broader legal community, Tom is an internationally recognized authority on bad faith, reinsurance, and insurance. Retained as counsel by numerous major insurance carriers and policyholders in more than 40 jurisdictions nationally and internationally, he is also an ARIAS-U.S. Certified Arbitrator and mediator, as well as co-author of the renowned insurance law treatise Couch on Insurance 3d and editor of the Reinsurance Professional’s Deskbook, both published by Thomson Reuters. Tom was also the founding president of the American College of Coverage and Extracontractual Counsel (ACCEC), an elite organization that brings together the top insurance lawyers in the U.S. and Canada to focus on the creative, ethical, and efficient adjudication of disputes between policyholders and insurers over insurance coverage as well as extracontractual damages.

Recently, Best Lawyers in America named Tom the Buffalo Insurance Law “Lawyer of the Year,” and the Defense Association of New York (DANY) presented him with its 2014 James S. Conway Award for Outstanding Service to the Defense Community.