Profesional Indemnity Insurance
Professional Indemnity Insurance, also known as Professional Liability Insurance, Errors and Omissions (E&O) Insurance, and Malpractice Insurance, is a vital safeguard for professionals across a range of industries. This insurance provides coverage against claims made by clients or third parties for financial losses due to professional negligence, errors, omissions, or inadequate advice.
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Why Choose Professional Indemnity Insurance?
Many professional businesses run the risk of suffering a financial and professional disaster without the invaluable protection that Professional Indemnity insurance (PII) provides.
Traditionally, only businesses such as Accountants, Surveyors, Engineers, Solicitors and Architects, the mainstream professions, were regarded as ‘professionals’ and obtained professional indemnity insurance.
Today, more businesses rely on services provided by others and the increased use of outside consultants and contractors has widened the scope of this term; therefore nowadays a ‘professional’ is often regarded simply as any person who offers a specialist advice or service.
What type of business needs Professional Indemnity Insurance?
As well as the usual professions holding indemnity insurance, many others either feel exposed or are required to hold professional indemnity insurance by their clients. These include builders and others in the construction industry, manufacturers, property managers, estate agents, marketing consultants, designers, IT consultants, management consultants and even feng shui experts! And so the list grows every day. See the bottom of this page for a list of common professions requiring professional indemnity insurance.
What PI Covers
Most Indemnity Insurance policies can provide you with the following covers:
- Breach of professional duty
- Defence costs
- Libel and slander
- Loss of documents
- Dishonesty of employees
- Fidelity
- Unintentional breach of confidence
- Infringement of copyright and intellectual property rights
- Previous firms or previous partners
You may need professional indemnity insurance if you…
- provide advice to your clients
- handle data belonging to a client or business
- are responsible for a client’s intellectual property
- provide a professional service and could be challenged on your work. You may feel confident in the quality of your work, but any small business is vulnerable to a claim of negligence when professional advice or services fail to meet a client’s expectations and cause financial loss.
Consequently, if you are a professional who gives advice and/or a professional service you should consider Professional Indemnity insurance. In the absence of adequate indemnity insurance a large successful claim could cause you personal bankruptcy or the insolvency of your company.
Even limited liability companies have balance sheets to protect and nobody wants to lose a business that they have worked hard to build. Professional Indemnity is therefore a must.
Professional Indemnity is a ‘claims made’ basis policy
One important aspect to bear in mind when considering professional indemnity insurance is timing. There can often be a long delay between an event and a subsequent claim so you need to be covered both at the time of the event and when the claim is made. It is the professional indemnity policy effective at the time of the claim which responds (known as a ‘claims made’ policy) but a Professional Indemnity policy must have been in place when the breach of professional duty was alleged to have taken place, although retrospective professional indemnity cover can easily be arranged.
It also means that if you plan to cancel your professional indemnity policy when you close your business or retire you may need to arrange “run off” cover for a period of time afterwards.
For more information, please see view the following information regarding “When to report a PII claim or circumstance”.
Precautions
One way to minimise professional indemnity claims is to make sure projects are well documented. Ensure that you set out specific responsibilities in your contracts with clients beforehand and deal with complaints promptly. Client “sign off” at critical stages in a contract can be very useful and is evidence of good housekeeping within a business.
Request a Professional Indemnity Quote Today
Rowlands & Hames offer advice and guidance on this specialist area of insurance and arrange the most suitable professional indemnity cover for you and your business. We have access to a wide range of Professional Indemnity insurers and therefore, quotations are available relatively quickly.
Policy limits and exclusions may apply, please see policy wording for full terms and conditions.
Contact the Team
Mike Watkinson Dip CII
- Business Development Director
- 01253 598973
- mike@rowlands-hames.co.uk
The Sectors
Testimonials
Many thanks to Rowlands & Hames, especially Gary Baxter who has helped and guided us through our insurances this last year, and problems [claims] when necessary. Your help and support are very much appreciated.
Further to all our communications and dealings over the last few months, we would like to thank you for your tenacity and achieving this result in respect to settling the above claim for £800.00. Please accept our thanks for keeping at the insurers and ensuring this favourable outcome.
I would have no hesitation in recommending Rowlands & Hames and Gary to individuals or corporate structures requiring insurance services. It is great peace of mind to know that a competent individual and broker is supporting both myself and my companies.
In response to the handling of a claim:
“Tony Swallow was excellent, a credit to Rowlands & Hames."
Further to all our communications and dealings over the last few months, we would like to thank you for your tenacity and achieving this result in respect to settling the above claim for £800.00. Please accept our thanks for keeping at the insurers and ensuring this favourable outcome.
Rowlands & Hames have always provided good advice, and have consistently ensured that my clients and I have appropriate and cost-effective insurance cover in place at all times, regardless of the complexities of the circumstances. Their claims-handling support is second to none in my experience.
Thank you so much for all of this and to Mike and Paul for making life so straightforward with renewal yet again. Our director has total confidence in the service you provide and is grateful for our longstanding partnership.
That’s great news Thanks for your persistence with this matter I am sure it made all the difference. It is nice to see someone go the extra mile for their customers even though it wasn’t really your problem. Once again thanks for the brilliant job and advice.
Regarding our latest newsletter: “What another classic example of Quality Customer Care – Sending out information like this is vital to ALL businesses and not just your Customers – so just to say you guys never cease to impress me.
The insurers were slow to make the payment once the claim settlement had been agreed. Our claims manager Colin chased this on our behalf. The service from Colin was wonderful, he communicated clearly and often and I really felt he was looking after our clam. Colin made the whole process quick and easy and took the stress out of it for us to thank you!
I would like to take this opportunity to commend one of your staff: Mike Watkinson.
This is customer service at its finest and Mike is surely a valuable and valued member of your staff.
Moving forward the team took the reigns in organizing the incident in a precise and methodical way. There were no delays, everyone was on site no later than Monday and everything generally ran smoothly throughout the refurbishment.
We received excellent service, speed and communication from Rowlands & Hames. The team that worked on my property were very knowledgeable, highly experienced, reliable and professional. They kept me up to speed as the job went a long. They were tidy and polite.
Paul has dealt with our business from day one and I have found him to be very knowledgeable and approachable.
We have been dealing with Trevor Taylor for many years and have always found him to be most helpful and professional in every way. His assistance in all aspects of out insurance has proved to be invaluable. I can recommend his service to anyone.
…service from Rowlands & Hames has been exceptional over the years.
I have to add that I have always been impressed by Tony’s help in the past for our commercial business insurance and I am equally so pleased in the way this insurance has been effected.
Just to let you know I have received payment from the insurance company.
May I take this opportunity to thank you and your colleagues for your help with this claim. You made it easier for me and kept me updated along the way.
Keep up the great work guys.
Great customer service from Gary Baxter and his team.
I have dealt with a number of other brokers in respect of our block policy prior to our agreement with R&H and am able to state confidently as the policyholder, I am more than satisfied and recommend without hesitation, the service given by your team being of an exceptionally high standard. Keep up the good work.
Thank you June – your response was very quick as usual, really good service
…the [travel] insurance has been fantastic and sorted everything out very promptly for him – his son is still out there with him and [the travel insurer] have covered all of that so thanks very much to them and you and Mike etc for all your help.
I would also like to inform you that I am leaving next Thursday. I would like to thank you for all your help and hard work that you have supported me with. Your service was incredible and I would recommend you with the highest regards to anyone. Thank you.
Thank you so much Colin to you and Tony for all your all efforts on our behalf. We cannot thank you enough.
I wanted to thank you very sincerely for obtaining the insurance claim monies for me. The system was very trouble free for me. It is a great help, and also gives me much confidence in case there are future problems. Meanwhile, very many thanks for your work regarding this issue.
I found the staff to be very efficient and professional and would recommend your company to anyone. Good job
Following a dispute with an insurer over temporary unoccupancy… “It’s today’s actions that will determine which and how companies come out of this. You have been brilliant and show the true value of having a broker. Catch up soon. Thanks
My associations with Rowlands & Hames goes back 20 years or so. I have always found them exemplary in any advice, claims etc. We recently had what we considered to be a potentially difficult public liability claim with a major client of ours but this was soon successfully concluded by John Isles and his very efficient team. I am extremely pleased with our involvement with this company.
I’ve always had great service from Rowlands Hames so would be happy to ask you for help with other insurances as they come up for renewal.
Many thanks for your assistance, you’ve been first class as always this is why we use professionals like yourselves.
great CSR to help us get our insurances ready for our first 6 employees starting next week
Many thanks to you for your support throughout the claim process. The true value of having a Broker is realised when a claim occurs.
I am grateful and very impressed with the care and understanding R&H’s claims team have shown throughout a stressful and difficult time for me. I got my Fiat Panda back today, all sparkly and repaired; without your excellent handling of my claim, the last few months would have been so much worse as I have recovered from my injury. I have been a customer of yours since Andrew Dalby days and your company has never let me down.
Thank you Paul and it is because of the relationship we have with you, the way you throw everything at getting us the best response from the insurers and the flexible support that you give us that enables us to get on with delivering our work and not being bogged down/ restricted as we have in the past with previous insurers/brokers so again, thank you!
Amazing, thank you so much for your speedy response Rachel, very much appreciated as always
Hi Mike,
My pleasure. Julie has spoken very highly of you too with your help on the management companies.
Thanks Colin. Great work as per usual by R&H. Much appreciated.
Hi Dan,
Firstly, thank you for putting in a late shift the other evening to get all our new insurance policy documents over. All received and I’ve reviewed them and can confirm that all the details are all correct and that all terms and conditions are understood and acceptable. Both - Thanks for all your work on our annual renewal. You make the whole process very straightforward!
Thanks for all of your support in this Mike, Everyone feels better knowing that R&H and yourself in particular are there – I certainly do.
Thank you very much for providing such a detailed review of my insurance options regarding my two BTL (Buy to Let) properties.
I contacted Rowlands & Hames recently regarding a complex business insurance policy. The guidance and advice from Gary was absolutely brilliant. I would not hesitate to recommend Gary and his team.
I am so grateful for Liz Kelly and her huge help in getting the insurance sorted for my property. I have been waiting for 6 months for the transfer of ownership from the land registry and am still waiting. As an executor of my father's will, it has been a long journey. In the last 3 years, I have lost my mother, father, and my partner all to cancer and dealt with probate 3 times now and property. For once, I have felt someone truly tried so hard to sort out the issues, and Liz, no fuss just wanted the right outcome for someone she doesn't even know not knowing as a person my history of loss. Liz, you are an angel. Thank you so much 💓. You deserve a huge Christmas bonus.
Wow what can I say other than yet again thank you to yourself and Colin for all of the hard work you have put into getting a result for us on this, we have gone backwards and forwards and not made it easy for you (certainly not on purpose!) this is an amazing result and we are incredibly surprised and happy! Thanks again both, you really do look after us and if there was an award for it you would win it!
I have had so many brokers emailing me over the last few weeks wishing to discuss how they can help us and I take great pleasure each time in mentioning the ongoing and great relationship we have with our brokers and that they cannot possibly compare – I am right every time!
Dear Paul
Whilst Janet has been your point of contact, and will remain so going forwards, I just wanted to say thank you for your diligence in this matter. We have been impressed by your feedback, and for my part I am relieved that our business interruption cover and documents cover Is now on a floating (non-location specific) basis. This has been a concern during our most recent renewals. We look forward to working with you going forwards, and hope to meet you in person soon.
