Our weekly column of items of interest from in and around the Massachusetts insurance industry that we just couldn’t leave out.
First Lawsuit Under New Equal Pay Law Filed in Massachusetts
As our most avid readers will well-know by now, the new Massachusetts Equal Pay Law took effect on July 1st. One of the points made in our April article entitled “Ten Points About The Massachusetts Equal Pay Law Taking Effect July 1, 2018,“ was the prediction that “inevitable lawsuits” against employers would result after the MEPA takes effect. To wit, we wrote:
The Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly, a trade publication for Massachusetts lawyers, had an article in March about the new equal pay law that had the subtitle: “But lawsuits seem inevitable come July 1.” In that article, a Boston lawyer, Daniel S. Tarlow, a specialist in employment law and litigation, was quoted as saying regarding MEPA taking effect, “It’s hard for me to believe there won’t be an earthquake in Massachusetts [of litigation].” The reason Attorney Tarlow gave in the article for predicting such litigation was that “a lot of employers ‘have problems they don’t really even understand.’”
This has already come to pass. As reported in The Boston Globe, The Boston Herald, and The New York Times, the principal flutist of the Boston Symphony Orchestra has filed the first gender pay discrimination lawsuit under the new law. In filing suit, Elizabeth Rowe claims that she is receiving approximately 75 percent of the compensation of comparable male colleagues. Or more specifically, the orchestra’s principal oboist, who is a man and who is seated right next to her.
Clearsurance clears 100,000 reviews and launches company profile pages
Clearsurance announced that is has launched new company profile pages for auto insurance marketplaces and that it has now surpassed 105,000 reviews and 75 subscribers.
Customers are coming to Clearsurance to learn from the experiences of other policyholders as a way to short-cut the time and energy required to understand the best choices available to them when shopping for car, home or renters insurance,” said Michael Crowe, co-founder and CEO of Clearsurance.
The new company pages build upon the pages that the rating and review platform has already built for insurance companies and which offer a paid subscription option to companies that offers analytics and benchmarking results.
Cambridge-based BitSight Raises $60 million in Series D Funding
Cambridge-based BitSight Technologies has raised $60 million dollars in Series D funding. In total, the the security ratings firm has raised a total of $155 million in funding. This latest Series D financing was led by Warburg Pincus, with participation from existing investors Menlo Ventures, GGV Capital and Singtel Innov8. The company says the additional funding will enable it to continue its rapid global expansion as it closes in on its goal of becoming the Global Standard of Security Ratings.
Founded in 2011, the company was one of the pioneers in security ratings and was the first company to develop a security ratings product. The company now has over 1,200 customers worldwide that collaborate and verify using BitSight Security ratings on a daily basis.
