Erie sold shares in an initial public offering in 1990. Today, it operates in 11 states and is the 12th largest auto insurer in the U.S. by direct premiums written, according to the company’s website.

To keep the business in family hands, Hirt created two trusts that gave his descendants control of Erie’s voting shares, stipulating that his descendants must maintain controlling interest in the voting class or convert all the shares at once to common stock.

Sibling Rivalry

Hagen, who joined Erie’s board as its first female member in 1980, and her brother, Frank William Hirt, each became a beneficiary of one of the trusts, as well as trustees for both entities, when Hirt died in 1982.

Relations between Hagen and her brother were sometimes frayed. In 1999, Hirt, then the company’s chief executive officer, led a board action to reduce the amount of directors by one and to nominate all directors except her for the seats.

When Hagen sued, Hirt accused her of breaching her fiduciary duty as a Hirt family trustee and tried to prevent her from ever nominating board members in the future, according to a 2001 SEC filing that incorporated a judgment by the Common Pleas Court of Erie County, Pennsylvania, Orphan’s Court division, which deals with trust cases. President Judge William R. Cunningham ruled in Hagen’s favor.

Increased Control

Hirt “is seemingly blinded by his animosity towards his sister or his loyalty to present management and/or the Board,” Cunningham wrote in his 2000 decision.

Hagen increased her control of the company in 2006, when her family’s limited partnership purchased 6 percent of voting shares that had been owned by one of Erie’s first non-family employees. She graduated with dual degrees in psychology and English from Wittenberg University, a liberal arts college in Springfield, Ohio.

She has become the school’s biggest donor. Last year, she donated $6 million to endow the university’s Center for Civic and Urban Engagement. It was the largest cash gift ever given to the university from a living individual.