Guild Yule occupies, and some would argue dominates, an insurance-focused space in the Vancouver community. “Guild Yule has the insurance industry on lockdown in this market,” confirms a peer. The firm has also grown in its geographic footprint; a planned office in Kelowna, in British Columbia’s inland, has become a reality and has seen a steady build-out, with Shauna Gersbach and Shaun
Frost helming this expansion. “The Kelowna build-out has been going well from what I can tell,” voices a peer. “Shauna actually just finished a trial!” Guild Yule practitioners have been active in a wide spectrum of areas, spanning more novel and timely claims related to COVID to more traditional property loss claims.“We do a lot of the same work they do, but I have to confess, I feel like Guild Yule has a leg up on us in the subject-matter expertise department,” confides one BC contemporary. “You can just tell that they live and breathe this work.”
In Vancouver, Neil MacLean attends to a varied insurance and product liability practice. MacLean is “a trusted advisor to several carriers” as well as a litigator and has recently been called in to give opinions on claims related to COVID on such issues as trip-cancellation coverage. Stephanie Hamilton attends to negligence-related matters in the healthcare field, defending nurses and various other medical employees. “Stephanie and
Dave Bell do an enormous amount of that professional liability work in the health industry,” confirms a peer. “They defend hospitals and nurses. Dave Bell also does a lot of human rights.”
Mark Gyton is actively pursuing maritime law, as well as subrogation coverage work and related product liability matters. Vernon Pahl is another one of the two practitioners in the firm attending to maritime work. Adam Howden-Duke attends to a more varied practice that touches on insurance, medical malpractice and other professional negligence, and product liability. A peer addresses him as, “a really smart guy, who, when I saw him on a file, really stood out from the rest, really left an impression.” Howden-Duke was one of a team working on a property-loss claim concerning leaks of sulfuric acid produced by a smelter, which allegedly damaged vehicles that drove through it. These affected vehicles were subsequently considered write-offs by the insurance entities. “That was an interesting case,” notes a peer. “[It] Involved hundreds of discoveries.” Kristal Low is noted for her work that is largely dedicated to professional liability for the health industry, as well a thriving labor and employment advisory practice. Jim Doyle is noted to be “very active in trials. He had some remarkable success in the ‘social host’ world, fending one of those big cases off.”
Mark Skorah, one of the firm’s more seasoned partners, remains active with a diverse basket of work ranging from product liability, personal injury, errors-and-omissions work, directors and officers liability insurance and administrative law. Skorah’s decades-enhanced experience also finds him working in an advisory capacity.
