National insurance broker World Insurance Associates reported that it acquired Fillmore Insurance Agency of Brooklyn, New York on March 1, 2026.
Fillmore is a commercial lines focused agency with specialties in real estate, contractors and retail stores. The agency, which was founded in 1970, also offer personal lines insurance. The agency is led by John Sluyk, James Sluyk, Patrick Sluyk and Stephen Van Sluyk.
Terms of the transaction were not disclosed.
Giordano, Halleran & Ciesla provided legal counsel to World on the transaction. Satin and Lee Law P.C. provided legal counsel to Fillmore, and Sica Fletcher advised them on the transaction.
World Insurance, based in Iselin, New Jersey, is ranked #14 on Insurance Journal’s Top 100 Independent Property/Casualty Insurance Agencies list. The agency serves clients from more than 250 offices across the U.S. and U.K.
There are many reasons a business or individual might buy umbrella coverage. They may have current assets that they want to shield from the potential for loss. They may also be planning to shield future assets. They may just want the added security of knowing that in the event of a catastrophic liability claim, they are protected–and with judgments on the rise, who can blame them?
The insured may need a simple $1 million umbrella policy to make sure they are in compliance with a contract; or they may be a bigger insured with the potential of a catastrophic liability claim and they may need a complex liability tower, with multiple insurance companies and excess over excess policies. In either case, there are a few ways where their liability protection could fall apart, and they may not even realize these traps exist.
Any policy wording that is quoted here comes from the ISO CU 00 01 04 13 Commercial Liability Umbrella Coverage Form. Read your full policy for details about the specific situation that your client (or you) may be in.
In the first sentence, we immediately learn that there’s no such thing as a claim that “isn’t that bad” when it comes to this coverage form. It wants to know whenever something comes up that may result in a claim. The amount of the potential claim doesn’t matter. It also doesn’t seem to matter whether or not there’s an actual claim. The wording tells us that the offense or occurrence may result in a claim.
In the second sentence, we learn that when a claim is made against any insured, this policy also wants the company to be notified immediately. This may seem like a restatement of what we’ve already seen, but the difference comes from who received notice of the potential claim. In the first sentence, the claim was received by “you,” which is specific to the named insured. In the second sentence, the claim was received by any insured, which is a much broader term.
This forces us to look back at the Who Is An Insured section to discover who the policy considers an insured. We will leave that to you to read later, but everyone who qualifies as an insured according to that section could be given notice of a claim. This is also a reminder that an additional insured is an insured, and when that additional insured receives notice of a claim, this policy wants to know that, too.
The last sentence restates something that we’ve seen three times now: The policy wants to know about any claim as soon as is practicable. According to the Cambridge Dictionary Online, practicable means able to be done or put into action. That’s a good definition, but it is open to interpretation, which means that there may be disagreement about when something is practicable.
