Ms. D’Alelio is a Partner and Co-Chair of the Insurance and Catastrophic Loss Group of Robins Kaplan LLP in Boston. She successfully counsels clients in cases involving a wide variety of insurance lines, including commercial property and homeowner’s policies, and represents them in litigation and trial. Ms. D’Alelio has substantial experience defending litigation over collapse, design defect, earth movement, environmental exposure, and catastrophe claims such as tornadoes, floods, earthquakes, fires, and windstorms. She also helps her clients quickly and efficiently resolve measurement disputes in appraisal and reference.Ms. D’Alelio’s insurance practice also includes the resolution and litigation of liability coverage issues under commercial, and other standard form and manuscript policies. She advises insurers in complex coverage disputes involving advertising injury coverage, additional and other insured questions, the application of misrepresentation defenses, and exclusions under claims made and occurrence based policies. Ms. D’Alelio works with her clients to avoid the escalation of conflict and to achieve reasonable and cost-effective determinations, counseling her clients on effective ways to minimize exposure to extra-contractual “bad faith” liability claims.

Ms. D’Alelio served as the Program Co-Chair for the Property Insurance Law Committee (“PILC”) of the American Bar Association’s Tort Trial & Insurance Practice Section (“TIPS”) and has been a vice-chair for several years. Ms. D’Alelio was recently accepted into the Federation of Defense & Corporate Counsel (“FDCC”). Ms. D’Alelio is also a member of Massachusetts’ Equal Justice Coalition, which is committed to securing civil legal aid in the state, and the Massachusetts Womens’ Bar Foundation, where she represents abused women. Ms. D’Alelio was recently recognized by the
Massachusetts Women’s Bar Association as part of the “Women’s Leadership Initiative,” was awarded “Excellence in the Law” recognition by Massachusetts Lawyer’s Weekly, and has been recognized as a Massachusetts “Super Lawyer” for the past six years.

Ms. D’Alelio graduated from Mount Holyoke College and Northeastern University School of Law. She is the first college graduate and lawyer in her family. Earlier in her career, Melissa was honored to serve as a legislative intern to Massachusetts’ first woman majority leader, and as a judicial
intern to the nation’s first African-American Chief United States Magistrate Judge. She was also an associate in the Global Risk Management sector of the Financial Aid Assurance Practice of PricewaterhouseCoopers. All that being said, Melissa believes some of her best training as a lawyer came
from growing up in a large, Italian family, where she frequently negotiated and advocated over the dinner table. She enjoys continuing to hone these skills with her husband and three small children.