J. KENDALL HUBER

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When J. Kendall Huber first moved to Massachusetts, he had already lived and practiced law in several locations, including Virginia, Maryland, Tennessee and a naval station in Sigonella, Italy, where he did a stint as a JAG lawyer.

But his decision to stay in New England, where he currently serves as senior vice president and general counsel of The Hanover Insurance Group, has made him a true leader in his profession.

When Huber arrived in 2000, Hanover was a much smaller insurance company called Allmerica Financial. Huber says he was attracted to Allmerica because it was one of the few multi-line insurance companies at the time, with policies in life insurance, business, and property and casualty.

It was also one of the first insurance companies to de-mutualize and become a public company.

“In assessing whether this was a place I wanted to be, that a company should be ahead of its time sounded like an interesting place to [work],” Huber says.

But only two years into his tenure, the market crashed, leaving the company short of capital and under scrutiny by Securities and Exchange Commission regulators. The CEO resigned and the company’s stock price plummeted from $50 to $7.

Huber helped lead the company out of the woods, stepping in as a member of the interim leadership team that filled the void after the CEO’s resignation. Some of the changes included selling off the life insurance business and adopting a more conservative investment philosophy.

“We had to restructure and crawl back, and ultimately we were very successful,” Huber says.

The lessons from that crisis have helped the company survive, even thrive in, the current economic environment. Having shed its life insurance business, it didn’t have guarantees that exposed other insurers to the 2008 market crash.

“We didn’t have high-yield securities, we didn’t have a lot of equities, and we didn’t have a lot of debt obligations that really went bust at that time, so our investment portfolio rode that out,” he says.

The amount of net written premiums grew from $2.2 billion in 2003 to more than  $3 billion today, and the company went from a business consisting of 65 percent in personal insurance lines and the rest in commercial lines to a more balanced mix today of 52 percent in commercial and 48 percent in personal lines.

“The company now is very different from the company I joined,” Huber says. “We’re very ambitious for the size of company we have; it’s an exciting place.”

In overseeing an in-house legal staff of 40, including 13 attorneys, Huber says that the technical aspects of the law, such as new SEC regs, corporate governance rules, privacy laws and data security issues, are “accelerating at a frightening pace.”

“It’s a little scary for companies and their legal departments. It’s ambitious to keep up with,” he says.

But Huber says his biggest challenge as general counsel is hiring and retaining good people.

Unlike in private practice, he says, in-house lawyers have to get along with their single client day in and day out.

“You have to have people who wear well in the sense that the business people want to work with them and share ideas,” Huber says. “If [the lawyers] throw cold water on every idea, well, people might not share those ideas, and [they] might get implemented without being properly vetted because people work around [the attorneys].”

Along with being the biggest challenge, hiring and retaining talent is also his most important task.

“I consider that to be the single most important thing I have to do. As a general counsel, you can’t do it all.”

J. KENDALL HUBER

The Hanover Insurance Group

AGE: 56

GRADUATED: University of  Virginia Law School, 1979

POSITION: Senior vice president and general counsel, The Hanover Insurance Group

OUTSIDE ACTIVITIES: Worcester Chamber of Commerce, leadership committee of Access to Justice Campaign, Legal Assistance of Central Massachusetts

The biggest challenge facing in-house counsel today: “The proliferation of technical rules and requirements that touch every part of our business.”

One thing about him that might surprise people: “I have a sense of humor; people are sometimes surprised.”