Guy Carpenter has appointed Jessica Ciak (pictured) as senior vice president in its Healthcare Segment, focusing on the US medical professional liability sector.
Based in Minneapolis, Ciak reports to Martha Jacobs, Guy Carpenter's healthcare segment leader. She joins from BMS Group, where she most recently served as senior vice president, bringing more than 25 years of treaty reinsurance placement experience across property and casualty lines, with a recent focus on specialty lines including medical professional liability.
John Trace, Guy Carpenter's CEO for North America and global chief broking officer, tied the hire directly to conditions in the malpractice market.
"Our clients are navigating unprecedented challenges in the medical malpractice insurance market, from record-setting verdicts to evolving plaintiff-favorable legislation. Jessica brings the expertise, perspective, and leadership our clients need to manage rising severity trends, aggregation exposures, and reinsurance capacity pressures," Trace said.
Ciak said she was looking forward to using the firm's market intelligence and placement strength to help clients navigate what she called a critical period for the line.
Trace's reference to "record-setting verdicts" reflects a documented and accelerating trend rather than a general talking point.
The average of the top 50 medical malpractice verdicts rose from $32 million in 2022 to $56 million in 2024, a 75% increase in just two years, according to WTW's Spring 2026 Insurance Marketplace Realities update.
By January 2026, at least two individual medical professional liability verdicts had already exceeded $100 million. Separately, reinsurer TransRe has found that the count of jury verdicts of $10 million or more nearly doubled between the 2013-2015 period and 2022-2024, a pattern that has pushed reinsurers to reassess how much aggregation risk they're willing to carry across a single carrier's book.
That severity trend has already reshaped how the primary market prices and structures coverage. WTW's own analysis found that many established carriers have reduced available limits from as much as $15 million down to $5 million or less in parts of the market, while insurers have responded more broadly with sub-limits, higher deductibles, extended retroactive dates and new exclusions, a combination that has driven meaningful growth in the standalone excess market as physicians and healthcare systems seek to rebuild the limits carriers are no longer willing to offer on a primary basis.
The Medical Liability Monitor's own annual rate survey has now recorded eleven consecutive years in which a majority of medical professional liability rate filings have moved upward rather than down, extending into 2026 renewals.
For carriers and MGAs writing medical professional liability, a reinsurance broker adding senior specialist capacity in this line signals that placement complexity in the space has reached a point where treaty structuring itself has become a more specialized skill set, particularly around aggregation exposure across a cedent's full book rather than individual policy limits alone.
For retail brokers and healthcare risk managers, the shrinking primary limits and growing reliance on standalone excess layers documented by WTW mean placement strategies increasingly depend on how well-capitalized reinsurers remain willing to support this line at scale, making experienced reinsurance intermediary relationships, like the one Guy Carpenter is building with this hire, more consequential to how much capacity ultimately reaches the primary market.
