More than any other single event, the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attack on the World Trade Center in New York marked a turning point for the Westfield Group in its approach to risk management.

Just six weeks before the attacks, Westfield invested $127 million in a 99-year lease agreement with the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey for control of the 400,000-square-foot concourse shopping center beneath the Twin Towers.

The towers' collapse completely destroyed the underground mall. In the hours immediately after the attacks, Westfield's executive leadership and regional crisis management teams elected to temporarily close all of the company's malls worldwide as a precaution against additional attacks.

“We didn't know the scale of what was happening in New York and whether it was going to affect other parts of the U.S. or other countries around the world,” said Eamonn Cunningham, chief risk officer for the Sydney-based retail property management and development company. “We took the conservative approach across all of our locations globally, and through the respective crisis management teams decided that we needed to put certain additional security measures in place before we opened our doors again.”

Following the attacks, Mr. Cunningham served as Westfield's primary witness in Silverstein Properties Inc.'s years-long legal battle with insurers over the recovery amount to be paid out under the limits of its insurance policy for the Twin Towers, which had not been finalized at the time of the Trade Center's destruction.

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Westfield itself was reimbursed for the revenue it lost as a result of the attacks through its $140 million sale of its interests in the World Trade Center site back to the Port Authority in 2003, and will re-open retail operations in the new trade center in 2015.

Mr. Cunningham — as well as those who work closely with him — said the experience of watching the attacks unfold and the maddeningly complex insurance-related litigation that resulted from them had a profound effect on him personally and professionally, and has informed his approach to risk mitigation, crisis response and insurance management.

“One thing that I definitely learned from that event, and it's lived with me ever since, is the fundamental notion of contract certainty when it comes to insurance,” Mr. Cunningham said. “The year after Sept. 11 and in every year since, by the time that the last day of June rolls around before our renewals, I've made sure that I had absolute certainty in terms of coverage in all of our insurance programs worldwide.”

That prioritization of insurance contract certainty would eventually lead Mr. Cunningham to develop and implement regular full-day “loss workshops,” during which Westfield's major insurance policies are tested against a series of hypothetical claims scenarios by members of Westfield's risk management team and key operational leaders, underwriters from the company's leading insurers, its account specialists at Marsh L.L.C. and several other third-party service providers.

At the conclusion of each loss workshop, the various parties enter into a memorandum of understanding outlining each entity's rights and responsibilities should the hypothetical claim scenario used in the workshop actually occur.

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“The Sept. 11 attacks showed not only Westfield but plenty of our other clients that you can have a wonderful insurance program underwritten by great insurance companies, but you also have a responsibility to have your own house in order in terms of your business continuity and resiliency planning,” said David Bidmead, Marsh's New York-based global multinational client service leader. “If the best outcome is when your expectations of what's going to happen in the event of a claim and your insurers' expectations are the same, why wouldn't we get the insurance companies that support Westfield together and walk through how these policies would react in the event of a loss incident?”

Though the loss workshops were by all accounts a cumbersome process at first, their practical value was made clear following a 2010 arson incident at the Westfield Roselle shopping center in Sacramento, Calif.

With a memorandum of understanding in place to guide Westfield's risk management team through its interactions with insurers, loss adjusters and forensic accountants, Mr. Cunningham said the company was able to reach a settlement on the value of its losses — which totaled more than $70 million — in less than eight months.

“Having that memorandum of understanding definitely helped,” Mr. Cunningham said. “It meant that we had an established set of protocols that laid out who would be involved in the claim if an event like that arose and identified the communication channels.

“Bad things do happen,” he added, “but when you've had an opportunity to have an interaction with insurers without the dark cloud of a claim hanging over you, it allows you to develop and nurture the relationship more effectively and use those relationships when an event does occur.”