Split views on Poizner pick

California Insurance Commissioner Steve Poizner on Wednesday named as his top lawyer a partner from a high-powered international law firm that has long battled Proposition 103, the landmark insurance initiative passed by voters in 1988.

Poizner appointed Adam Cole, a 46-year-old graduate of Harvard Law School, as general counsel, heading a Department of Insurance staff of 80 attorneys.

Cole is a partner in a firm that has a long history of representing State Farm Casualty Insurance Co. in challenging the 1988 initiative still considered the nation’s most stringent system of rate regulation, some consumer activists complained.

Cole’s tenure at the firm “qualifies as having ties to the industry,” said Harvey Rosenfield, the Santa Monica activist lawyer who wrote Proposition 103 and successfully campaigned for its passage against deep-pocketed insurance companies.

Cole, however, stresses that most of his time at Heller Ehrman has been spent suing insurance companies on behalf of policyholders, from large corporations to small businesses and individual homeowners.

“I have devoted a 17-year career at two law firms to pursuing insurance recoveries for policyholders,” he said. “I have never represented an insurance company in any matter.”

Cole, who will earn a state salary of $160,000, slightly more than his firm pays attorneys fresh out of law school, said he had long wanted a career in public service.

According to a Department of Insurance biography, Cole helped collect more than $5 billion from insurers for policyholders just in the last five years. He has been active in a number of high-profile cases, including claims arising from hurricanes Katrina and Rita in 2005 and the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center in 2001, the biography said.

Rosenfield, who endorsed Poizner when he ran for insurance commissioner last year, said he was particularly troubled that Cole’s appointment followed the naming earlier this year of former insurance industry lobbyist Bill Gausewitz as the commissioner’s special legal counsel for policy issues.

Rosenfield this month called on Poizner to fire Gausewitz. He contended that Gausewitz “covertly” helped insurers in a lawsuit they brought against the commissioner.

Poizner said Gausewitz did nothing improper.

Another consumer activist, Amy Bach, director of United Policyholders in San Francisco, shared Rosenfield’s concerns about Gausewitz’s connections to the insurance industry.

But Bach said her worries did not extend to Cole. She said she valued his experience in going after insurers on behalf of business clients and was satisfied that he remained distant from his firm’s Proposition 103 work for State Farm, the state’s biggest home and automobile insurer.

“He’s not an insurance defense lawyer; that’s quite clear,” Bach said.

Insurance industry officials said they expected fair treatment from Cole.

“He understands the business of insurance,” said Ken Gibson, a lobbyist for the American Insurance Assn. in Sacramento.

marc.lifsher@latimes.com