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Posted By: warshawlaw

As you know, you have to think defensively when it comes to insurance. When I was doing claims investigations a decade ago as an insurance defense attorney, I actually had a baseball card claim referred for analysis. The insurer will try to dissect your claim on the basis of card condition via the examination under oath procedure. I inventory all of the cards by the usual parameters (including the serial # for graded cards) on Excel. I also keep all receipts from grading services to prove I submitted the cards. The single best defense you have is to scan every single insured card, or at least all valuable ones. Use a high resolution setting. It is a total pain in the butt, yet it will save you countless hours of hassling if you have to make a claim. It is especially important for any valuable raw card.

I'd also recommend you look into insurance that does not require an inventory and valuation. The collectors insurance that advertises in SCD is like that. I say this because if you are an active card trader and/or buyer, an inventoried insurance policy may be problematic. Many of these policies do not cover you for additional cards beyond the inventory or added value for new acquisitions. I had one for several years and always had difficulty adding new cards to the policy. Every year I had to submit a voluminous inventory and then had to spend hours going through the schedule to the policy fixing the errors the monkeys made when inputting the data. What you want is a policy that lets you state an overall limit of value and worries about specific inventories at the time a loss is claimed. These carriers defer analysis of your collection until the claims process. If you have the visual inventory and your records, it should be relatively painless to make a claim, and if the insurer hassles you unduly, the visual inventory will look marvelous blown up on a screen in front of a jury in a bad faith trial.