Even small mistakes can cause big problems. Protect your work, reputation and bank balance with professional indemnity insurance for professional people.
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Professional indemnity insurance (PI) protects people and businesses that provide specialist services for paying clients. So...design, numbers, words, ideas, tuition, advice or anything else.
Professional indemnity insurance is your friend if one of those clients says you've done something wrong that's cost them money, and they sue you.
Your PI policy pays for a specialist solicitor to defend you, and also picks up the tab for any compensation or damages you have to pay.
That means it offers not only solid business protection, but valuable peace of mind.
Want to know more? Watch this video. Or read our quick guide: What is professional indemnity insurance?
Anyone offering any kind of service to paying clients needs professional indemnity insurance. It protects you from claims by those clients that your work fell short of expectations.
That can happen to anyone, for all sorts of reasons. And whether you think a claim is justified or not, you’ll still have to do something about it. Hoping it’ll simply go away isn’t an option.
That means a good deal of time and expertise if you reckon on handling the legal legwork yourself. Or money if you want to buy it in. More money, too, if you have to pay compensation and costs.
Professional indemnity insurance is your secret weapon. Having it means you get the might of an expert insurer in your back pocket, ready to fight your corner and protect your finances.
Read more about who needs professional indemnity insurance?
Because Murphy’s law says that if something can go wrong it will. Not forgetting that none of us are perfect, no matter how good we think we are at what we do. We can all make mistakes.
Others can make mistakes on our behalf too. Like a contractor or supplier who doesn’t hold up their end of the bargain and sends a job into freefall. Only the buck stops with you.
A mistake that a client says has cost them money usually means a claim for compensation. Unfortunately, that’s when lawyers get involved and costs start to escalate.
By picking up the tab for your defence and covering any pay-outs, professional indemnity insurance takes care of everything. It means you’ll still have a business left to run once all the drama’s over.
Read more about why do I need professional indemnity insurance?
Generally, but depending on the exact wording of your PI policy, it pays to defend you against claims of:
Read more about what does professional indemnity insurance cover.
How much professional indemnity insurance you need depends on what you do and on what scale. That said, working out a precise amount isn’t an exact science.
As a rule of thumb, think about the worst mistake you could make, how much it could cost to put right, how much compensation you might have to pay your client and what the legal costs might be. Big numbers, right?
Also remember that if a project goes horribly wrong because of something you did, a client may sue you for the entire cost of the failure, not just your part in it.
Buying as much professional indemnity as you can afford is a good place to start. You can never have too much.
Other things to consider are that some professional associations require members to have professional indemnity cover at a minimum level. Plus, clients may make having a certain amount of professional indemnity a condition of their contracts.
Read more about how much professional indemnity insurance do I need?
How much your PI policy costs depends on what you do and how much of it you do.
Some professions are ‘riskier’ than others. For example, the stakes can be high if an architect or engineer gets things wrong, and the numbers involved in a claim can be large.
Also, a business that does, erm, a lot of business with a lot of clients is more likely to be sued than one that doesn’t - simply by the laws of probability.
Where professional indemnity insurance is worth its weight in gold is in helping to protect any type of business from the potentially crippling financial repercussions of a claim.
And the good news is, prices start from around £5.13 a month for £50,000 worth of cover. When you get a professional indemnity insurance quote you’ll be able to select your occupation from among the hundreds we cover.
Read more about how much does professional indemnity insurance cost?
How long have you got? Professional indemnity claims come in all shapes and sizes. That’s because there are a lot of different professions, a lot of different things can go wrong, and some mistakes are more costly than others.
Here are a few PI claims we’ve come across, some of which ran into the £tens of thousands and more:
Discover more professional indemnity insurance claims examples.
These two are like chalk and cheese, but people often confuse them. Maybe it’s because there’s a tendency to mash up their names. People often ask us for ‘professional liability insurance’ or ‘public indemnity’, for example.
In reality, they’re two very distinct types of cover, that serve two very different purposes. And the likelihood is that you’ll need both professional indemnity and public liability insurance.
Here’s what they do in a nutshell:
Read more about the difference between professional indemnity and public liability insurance.
You can. But it’s a bit like playing Russian Roulette.
That’s because for a claim on your professional indemnity insurance to be valid, your policy needs to be up and running at two points:
So, if you buy a PI policy to cover a contract, then cancel it as soon as it finishes, you could be facing a problem. The reason being claims relating to your work can emerge weeks, months or even years later.
If that happens, and you’ve let your professional indemnity slide in the meantime, you won’t be covered. It’s far safer to get the protection an annual policy offers.
Read more about short-term professional indemnity insurance.
Because we’re a specialist business insurance broker with the know-how to get you a professional indemnity insurance policy that’s the right fit for your business, quickly and easily.
Our simple online quote process makes the whole thing painless, plus we’ve got friendly expert advisers waiting to take your call if you need them. Oh, and we’re a Lloyds broker, too.
Here’s some more reasons to buy your professional indemnity insurance from us:
But it’s customer feedback that really counts, so take a look at ours. We think it speaks for itself.
There’s plenty of ways to protect your business with insurance. Here’s some other cover you might want to add alongside your professional indemnity.
Public liability – covers claims for injuries or damage to people and their property on your premises or elsewhere, including trips, slips and falls.
Employers’ liability – covers claims that your employees were injured or made ill at work. It’s a legal requirement if you have staff.
Cyber – covers hacking and cybercrime. Provides the financial, legal and tech support you need to keep going if you’re hit by a cyber-attack.
Office – covers repair or replacement of your office equipment if it’s damaged or stolen, including IT kit and computers.
Portable equipment – covers the things you take out and about with you, like laptops, phones and cameras.
Business interruption – covers lost revenue and pays for you to set up elsewhere temporarily if something like a fire or flood stops you operating normally.
Directors’ & officers’ – covers directors’ and officers’ personal liability if there’s an accusation of wrongdoing like financial mismanagement or health and safety failure.
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