Human Trafficking + Equipment Failure + Workers' Comp Claims + Insurance Claims + Data Breach Costs & Cyber Insurance

I. Human Trafficking Evolves Into a Defense and an Offense in Court

With the Office of the Texas Attorney General estimating that 234,000 labor trafficking victims and 79,000 minor sex trafficking victims are suffering in the state at any given moment,2 the Texas Legislature, like many legislative bodies across the country, is going on the offensive and attempting to tackle traffickers where they are most vulnerable—at hotels and lodging facilities, entertainment venues, restaurants, massage parlors, salons, and other commercial enterprises where businesses willingly or unwittingly become a part of traffickers’ crimes against humanity.

One case out of Wisconsin – The State of Wisconsin v. Chrystul Kizer3 – illustrates how broadly courts and law enforcement agencies have shifted their perspectives on human trafficking victims. Litigators and law enforcement authorities no longer view trafficked individuals as prostitutes, but rather as individuals who are trapped and in need of aid from society at large. In the Kizer case, the Wisconsin Supreme Court will decide whether Kizer, a victim of sex trafficking as a teen, can use her trafficker’s illicit activities against her as a claim for self-defense after she was charged with the murder of her trafficker.

Cyber attacks are happening by the minute in every industry, wreaking havoc on operations and finances as well as the lives of clients and guests. The hotel industry is a particularly attractive target to cyber criminals because of the vast amount of private data and records those businesses hold. David Finz, an attorney and insurance broker specializing in cyber risk, discusses with LODGING the losses involved when a hotel falls victim to cybercrime and the protections cyber insurance can offer.

As Finz explains, "When people are reserving rooms, they offer their credit card number to hold the room—that is obviously valuable information, and if it gets into a hacker’s hands there could be breach response costs." Those costs could include hiring a privacy attorney to determine what went wrong and who should be notified of the breach, he adds. A forensic investigator could be brought in to discover the cause of the incident and what should be done to remediate it.