What is Professional Indemnity Insurance?

Any business providing a service or offering advice is likely to need Professional Indemnity Insurance. For most, it is seen as a critical business component.

As a professional, you owe a duty of care to your client and to the public at large and where you’re seen to have breached that duty, you could end up facing a claim.  Even where you’ve done nothing wrong, the costs of defending a claim are significant and that’s where Professional Indemnity Insurance comes in.

The cover provided is designed to protect you where your client or other third parties claim to have suffered a loss resulting from non-performance, breach of contract and/or professional negligence in the services provided.

Claims come in all shapes and sizes, from minor nuisance matters to catastrophic failures, but they can include third party property damage, consequential loss, personal injury or disputes around intellectual property etc.  The key point is that your PI policy should respond to claims arising from the provision of professional services.

Quite often, claims take a long time to resolve and that can be stressful; so it’s crucial for Brokers and Insurers to provide real support throughout the process and for the Insurer to offer financial protection against:

• The costs associated with defending the claim; And
• The cost of any damages paid to a claimant.

All policies are not the same.  There can be significant differences in the protection afforded by one Insurer and the next and this creates the potential for gaps, where the safety-net turns out to be not quite as effective as you thought!

That’s why it’s so important to be working with a specialist broker – one who knows your profession and takes the time to understand your business, who puts your interests first and achieves the right balance of insurer security, breadth of cover and of course, cost.  Like all forms of insurance, Professional Indemnity is a promise and you need to know that promise will be delivered upon when most required.

At Griffiths & Armour, we’ve been helping to keep professionals protected for over 90 years.  Acting as trusted advisors to over 3,000 consultancy firms and delivering the kind of insurance and risk management support that offers true peace of mind.

If you’d like to learn more about Professional Indemnity Insurance or get further insight into how we assist our clients, please get in touch.