Two Denver trial firms, one coverage practice

Colorado Coverage Lawyers is not a marketing name bolted onto a general practice. It is a working collaboration between two Denver firms that had, separately, spent decades suing insurance companies — and that concluded their clients would be better served if they stopped doing it separately.

How it started

When COVID-19 forced states to order their citizens to stay at home, the lawyers at Ogborn Mihm and Denver Trial Lawyers became concerned about how the pandemic would hit Colorado's small business owners. The firms' partners began talking with business owners and gathering insurance policies to see whether coverage existed to help their friends, families and colleagues.

They found that it often did — and that the reason claims were being denied had less to do with the policies than with how quickly the industry had settled on a single answer. So they combined their resources, talent and experience and took the fight to the insurance companies.

The pandemic files are largely behind us. The practice they built is not. Colorado businesses still lose roofs to hail, kitchens to fire, inventory to water and months of income to all three — and insurers still get the first word on whether any of it is covered.

What makes a coverage practice different

Insurance coverage work sits in an awkward place between contract law and tort. The first question is always textual: does this policy, with these endorsements, promise to pay for what happened? The second is behavioural: did the company handle the claim the way Colorado law requires?

Most firms are equipped for one or the other. A coverage practice needs both, because the leverage in a first-party dispute usually comes from the second question. Colorado's statutory bad faith remedy — two times the covered benefit plus attorney fees, under C.R.S. §§ 10-3-1115 and 10-3-1116 — is one of the strongest in the country, and it is available whenever a benefit is delayed or denied without a reasonable basis.

How we charge

Policy reviews are free. Litigation is handled on a contingency fee basis: we do not make money unless you recover funds. Businesses that have just lost a year of income are not in a position to fund a fight with a national carrier by the hour, and we have never thought they should have to.

Where we work

We are based in Denver, with offices downtown on Lincoln Street and in the Denver Tech Center, and we represent policyholders throughout Colorado — the Front Range, the Western Slope, the Eastern Plains and the mountain towns. Hail and wildfire do not respect county lines, and neither does our practice.