Many companies, particularly those who might be on a tight budget and are unwilling to add all but the essential to their expenditures, will have only one question when faced with the prospect of professional indemnity insurance: do I really need it? Professional indemnity insurance is not something you want to acquire unless it’s necessary in your line of work. However, the flipside of this is that if you are in one of the professions who could be affected by the outcome of an indemnity charge, and do not have professional indemnity insurance, you will not simply be looking at increased expenditure, but the potential long term survival of your business.
While in some professions, getting professional indemnity insurance or corporate insurance is simply the smart move, for others they don’t even have a choice, and this should demonstrate quite how essential it can be. For example, legal practitioners and people who provide both accounting and general financial services are legally obliged to be covered by professional indemnity insurance; as obviously in those trades, the stakes on which they give the advice on which actions are based are high, and clients have a lot to lose should the advice given to them transpire to be, in simple terms, ‘faulty.’
Other professionals for whom there is no legal obligation to have professional indemnity insurance in order to practice, but might fight valuable contracts hard to come by, include those providing a range of IT hardware and software, both in procurement and development, life coaches, management consultants, nuritionists – to name only a few. Ultimately, the question is: would the clients I deal with stand to suffer in a non-physical way, if the services I provide for them were not at the agreed standard? If the answer to this question is yes, then you should seriously consider getting professional indemity insurance, rather than just leaving yourself uncovered and hoping for the best.
