Shelby King Hayes, CIC, CPRM, AAI, is the Founder and Principal Consultant of The Coverage Consultants, an independent insurance coverage and risk management practice based in Canton, Georgia, serving clients and matters nationwide. With more than twenty years of property and casualty insurance experience, Ms. Hayes provides expert analysis, consulting, and testimony in matters involving insurance coverage, policy interpretation, coverage adequacy, agent and broker standard of care, procurement and placement of insurance, and errors and omissions exposure.

Ms. Hayes brings an unusually broad agency-side perspective to insurance disputes. Her career includes fourteen years managing a book of more than 2,200 personal and commercial lines clients, advancement into high net worth personal risk production, and senior leadership responsibilities in agency sales, operations, and client service. Her experience encompasses the practical mechanics of insurance placement from initial exposure identification and application through quoting, underwriting, binding, policy issuance, endorsement, renewal, and ongoing account servicing.

In expert and consulting engagements, Ms. Hayes reviews policies and endorsements, underwriting files, applications, binders, proposals, certificates of insurance, correspondence, coverage recommendations, renewal documentation, and agency records to reconstruct how coverage was requested, represented, placed, and maintained. She evaluates those facts against applicable policy language, ISO and proprietary forms, carrier underwriting and binding guidelines, agency practices, applicable statutes and regulations, and the duties and standards relevant to insurance professionals.

Ms. Hayes also maintains a specialized practice involving condominium and homeowners association insurance. These matters frequently require analysis beyond the master policy itself, including the interaction among governing documents, association insurance requirements, master policy provisions, and individual unit owner coverage. She reviews declarations, CC&Rs, bylaws, master policies, endorsements, reserve studies, financial information, and related records to identify coverage responsibilities, gaps, overlaps, valuation concerns, and potential deficiencies in insurance placement.

Her condominium and HOA work includes master policy gap analysis and HO-3/HO-6 allocation analysis, as well as evaluation of property, general liability, directors and officers liability, crime and fidelity, equipment breakdown, ordinance or law, flood, workers compensation, cyber, and excess liability exposures. She has developed proprietary, repeatable methodologies for evaluating community association insurance programs, including a weighted coverage-grading framework and comprehensive master policy analysis platform designed to assess coverage structure, responsibility allocation, and insurance adequacy consistently across associations.

Ms. Hayes holds the Certified Insurance Counselor (CIC), Certified Personal Risk Manager (CPRM), and Accredited Advisor in Insurance (AAI) professional designations and is a licensed property and casualty insurance professional in Georgia. She earned a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology from Georgia State University. She is also a published insurance industry contributor, including publication in the Private Risk Management Association's Member Perspectives addressing artificial intelligence, social media, and the evolving personal risk landscape.

As an independent, non-commissioned consultant, Ms. Hayes does not represent an insurance carrier, and her coverage analysis is conducted independently of insurer or agency compensation. Her work focuses on the insurance contract, the underlying documentation, applicable professional practices, and the specific facts surrounding the procurement and servicing of coverage.

Ms. Hayes is available for case screening and pre-litigation consulting, policy and endorsement analysis, agent and broker standard-of-care review, coverage adequacy analysis, file and chronology reconstruction, written expert reports, deposition preparation, mediation and settlement support, and consulting or testifying expert engagements. She is also available to present on insurance fundamentals, coverage disputes, agent E&O exposure, condominium and HOA insurance, high net worth personal risk, and emerging insurance issues, including CLE programs.