PLUS Tackles Challenges to Achieve Success

The Professional Liability Underwrit-ing Society (PLUS) will hold its 14th Annual PLUS International Conference in Chicago Nov. 14-16. Entitled The Challenge: Achieving Success, the 2001 Conference will focus on the changes the professional liability industry is currently experiencing and on helping participants reach both immediate and long-term goals while facing new challenges and intense competition.

The conference agenda covers many of the current and emerging topics in professional liability. Recognizing that education is an integral part of the lives of industry professionals, participants will again have the opportunity gain insurance and legal continuing education credits at the conference. Registrants will be able to receive credit for attending one, two or three parts of the educational agenda. Topics on the educational agenda include international D&O liability; medical professional liability; EPL exposures, insurance challenges of the construction marketplace; fiduciary liability; and others.

In addition to presenting a robust educational agenda, PLUS will be inducting a new president, Michelle A. Duffett of Insight Insurance Services Inc. of Geneva, Ill. Duffett will have the honor of becoming the first female president of the organization. The outgoing president is Peter W. Wilson of CNA Global Specialty Underwriting in Monmouth, N.J.

Highlights of the conference also include an impressive roster of keynote speakers. The keynote address at the opening session on Nov. 14 will be given by Dr. Cheryl L. Shavers, Former Under Secretary of Commerce and Technology in the Clinton administration. Shavers is a 25-year veteran of the high-tech industry with Fortune 500 companies, such as Intel, Hewlett Packard, and Motorola, who, as senior advisor to the Secretary of Commerce in forming new policies and program initiatives in science and technology, was charged with working in partnership with domestic and international industries to improve America’s commercial and industrial innovation, productivity and economic growth.

Shavers is an authority on the complex issues involving the globalization of technology and has many proactive views on the inter-relationship of business, technology and policy issues in regions such as the Middle East, Africa, Israel, China, Canada and Europe. She is also a frequently invited participant in high-level U.S.-South Africa, U.S.-Russia and U.S.-Japan science and technology forums

Also featured at the opening session will be George F. Will, syndicated columnist and Newsweek contributing editor. Will’s newspaper column has been syndicated by The Washington Post since 1974, and it now appears twice weekly in nearly 500 newspapers in the U.S. and Europe. He has been a regular contributing editor of Newsweek since 1976 and in 1977. Will won a Pulitzer Prize for commentary in his newspaper columns.

Will has also authored a number of books, among them three on political theory, “Statecraft as Soulcraft: What Government Does,” “The New Season: A Spectator’s Guide to the 1988 Election” and “Restoration: Congress, Term Limits and The Recovery of Deliberative Democracy.” In 1990, his book “Men At Work: The Craft of Baseball” topped The New York Times bestseller list for two months.

Thursday’s luncheon will feature Newt Gingrich, Former Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives. Gingrich is now the CEO of The Gingrich Group, an Atlanta-based communications and management-consulting firm. He also serves as a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C. and a distinguished visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University in Palo Alto, Calif.

Topics USA Tech Professional Liability