Historically the UK & Ireland professional indemnity (PI) market has focused on the ‘traditional professions’, providing protection against legal action for professionals such as solicitors, architects and accountants. Professionals within these sectors are well aware of their duty of care, the litigation risks they face and obligations placed upon them to have a minimum level of professional liability cover. However, as PI insurance developed beyond the traditional classes to other professional service providers, the same level of attention has not been afforded and they’ve been left in the cold when it comes to comprehensive and specialist protection.
Litigation risks are a genuine and increasing threat to a number of professional occupations, particularly in the current turbulent climate, yet little has been done to provide specialist coverage to those outside the traditional market. Tim Jones, professional indemnity specialist, commented, “The PI market generally refers to the ‘non-traditional’ professions as ‘miscellaneous’ and this reflects onto the type of cover that has been offered to them. Previously the market tended to take a generic stance to all requests for PI cover from ‘non-traditional’ professions and offered a basic ‘one size fits all’ approach.”
The broad ‘miscellaneous’ heading applied to most professional services outside of the traditional market is misleading given the wide variation of professions who require PI cover, ranging from HR consultants to bookkeepers and polygraph operators. Chubb Insurance has seen a growing demand in this sector and has now launched a new specialist professional indemnity cover to cater for this market.
“When we examined our book of PI business we realised that there is a growing number of professional service providers in a variety of industry sectors who need a PI policy that is in tune with their particular business risks,” added Mr Jones. “Our specialist approach, experience and newly designed policy allows us to adapt to suit a wide range of professional service providers and their specific risks, which we believe offers a much better solution in terms of both underwriting and client coverage.”
