Professional Indemnity Law

These are issues which could ‘break the business’, and we regularly receive instructions from law firms and other professional practices who need specialist input.

One of the problems with Professional Indemnity Law, is that most of the expertise resides with the panel firms which depend on the insurers for their bread and butter.  If they are not prevented from acting for an insured firm or individual by conflicts in the technical sense, their hands may still be tied by loyalties to their paymasters.

We do advise insurers, so we know where they are coming from.  And Frank Maher and Francis Dingwall each have respectively over thirty years’ experience of acting for PI insurers.  But we are not tied by panel relationships and most of the time, we represent the Insured.

We specialise in:

• Policy coverage disputes, including issues over the operation of the dishonesty exclusion.
• Notification issues: block notification of a number of potential claims to the current insurer, in order to seek renewal with a clean slate.
• Successor practice issues: advising on professional indemnity insurance issues on merger, demerger, sale or closure of a practice.
• Risk Management and Loss Prevention Programmes, and see in particular our page on the production of a risk report for a law firm that is looking uninsurable.
• Aggregation issues.
• Expert evidence.
• Dishonesty coverage.
• Indemnity consulations.
• Defence of professional liability claims. Between us, we have handled or supervised the defence of thousands of claims over 38 years, on instructions from insurers.  As well as defending solicitors, we act in the defence of accountants, insurance brokers, surveyors and other construction professionals.