In this podcast, Bert Wells, Cristina Shea and Adrienne Kitchen of Reed Smith’s Insurance Recovery Group delve into the critical topic of insurance coverage for supply chains, highlighting the significant risks and disruptions that can impact global logistics. This episode explores how events like political instability, cyberattacks and natural disasters can disrupt supply chains, and highlights the essential role insurance plays in mitigating these risks. The team shares real-world examples of supply chain disruptions and the insurance lessons learned from these cases, emphasizing the importance of understanding risks and ensuring adequate coverage. ----more---- Transcript: Intro: Hello, and welcome to Insured Success, a podcast brought to you by Reed Smith's Insurance Recovery lawyers from around the globe. In this podcast series, we explore trends, issues, and topics of interest affecting commercial policyholders. If you have any questions about the topics discussed in this podcast, please contact our speakers at insuredsuccess@reedsmith.com. We'll be happy to assist.  Adrienne: Welcome to Insured Success. My name is Adrienne Kitchen. I am a senior associate in Reed Smith's Insurance Recovery Group. Joining me are Bert Wells, a partner from our New York office, and Cristina Shea, a partner in San Francisco. Today, we're talking coverage for supply chains. Supply chains are relationships between a seller or manufacturer of goods and the supplier of those goods or things like the materials incorporated into products, raw materials, component parts, things like that. Supply chains can be disrupted by numerous things, whether price changes, transportation or storage failures, labor shortages, political instability, man-made physical losses to plants like fires, storage facilities, stores or cyber attacks, all of which pose a significant risk to businesses. A disruption in any part of the chain can cause losses in other parts of the chain. Insurance has become central to managing risk in global supply chains and logistics, particularly as they grow increasingly complex and vulnerable to disruption. Some types of insurance that may help cover losses to supply chains are contingent business interruption, supply chain, and trade disruption or cyber insurance. Other coverage types may cover some potential gaps in these insurance types. Global supply chain risks also is a focus of national policy and security. Cristina, would you like to discuss some of those?  Cristina: Yeah, thank you, Adrienne. So focusing on the U.S. first, you know, going back about, I don't know, 12 years or so, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security really started to recognize and understand the importance of securing the global supply chain. And along with that was recognizing, you know, its vulnerabilities and how it was susceptible to external forces. So to ensure that the global supply chain continued to function smoothly, the Obama administration adopted a national strategy in 2012. And that was designed to bolster and support the efficiency, I guess, of the insecurity of the global supply chain and ensure that it was able to withstand evolving threats. And then, you know, during the pandemic, the strain on the global supply chain really, it was, you know, front and center. It was under a microscope. And following the pandemic, the Biden administration really greatly enhanced some of that implementation of that strategy. And they took that program and addressed some of the acute supply chain crisis that had arisen due to the pandemic. And in the context of that, the Biden administration created a council on supply chain resilience and it implemented the use of the Defense Production Act that allowed U.S. Manufacturers to start creating essential medicines in the U.S. in order to mitigate some of the drug shortages. And all along throughout both the Obama and the Biden administration, the real focus has been on implementing security measures