Adams and Reese is pleased to announce the addition of Susan E. Mack to the firm’s Jacksonville office as Special Counsel. For more than 30 years, Mack has served as a senior executive and general counsel of insurance and reinsurance entities in both the life/health and property/casualty sectors, including leadership positions with Aetna and Transamerica Reinsurance (predecessor to SCOR Global Life).
“Susan is a very well-known and well-respected insurance legal professional with more than 30 years of experience in the industry in versatile roles as general counsel, corporate executive, arbitrator and even an entrepreneur, and we are honored to welcome her to Adams and Reese,” said Leslie A. Wickes, Adams and Reese Jacksonville Office Partner in Charge.
Most recently, Mack founded and served as President of Portia Consulting Services LLC, which provided arbitration and mediation services along with expert witness testimony to the insurance and reinsurance industries. Noted for her experience in insurance and reinsurance arbitration, Mack was one of the founders of ARIAS-US, the premier organization for insurance and reinsurance alternative dispute resolution. From ARIAS-US, she holds the baseline certification as arbitrator and the advanced credential of certified umpire. She is also a qualified mediator with ARIAS -US. She is credentialed as a commercial arbitrator by the American Arbitration Society. Mack has delivered more than 40 presentations on issues ranging from complex reinsurance claims, aggregation, occurrence, and allocation to annuity reinsurance and life securitization. She is a member of the Journal of Reinsurance’s Industry Advisory Board, and, for that publication, authors a quarterly column entitled “The Reinsurance Claims Executive’s Corner.”
“Susan’s professional involvement in the insurance industry has delivered significant contributions, and her knowledge of the industry landscape will prove valuable to the always changing business needs to further serve our clients in the insurance and reinsurance industries,” Wickes said.
Mack is licensed to practice in Florida, Connecticut, California, North Carolina and South Carolina.
As head reinsurance counsel at Aetna, Mack managed large value reinsurance litigations and arbitrations and negotiated directly with American reinsurers and Lloyd's of London to conclude complex reinsurance disputes. She recovered more than $60 million in disputed reinsurance claims. She served as senior vice president, general counsel and secretary of Transamerica Reinsurance, where she started up a Bermuda subsidiary and successfully strategized reinsurance arbitrations totaling more than $250 million in controversy.
Mack is the former Chair of the American Council of Life Insurers’ Reinsurance Committee, as well as the co-founder and former Chair of the Life Committee of the Reinsurance Association of America. She is a former director and present member of the Association of Life Counsel, a group of life/health senior corporate counsel and their retained counsel.
Maintaining close ties to the Jacksonville corporate counsel community, Mack is a co-founder and past President of the North Florida Chapter of the Association of Corporate Counsel. In the community, she is a member of Jacksonville Women’s Network and is the Event Chair of the Uptown Civitan Club.
Mack earned her J.D. at Boston College Law School, in 1982, and she received her B.A. from Dartmouth College, in 1979.