Professional indemnity insurance is a fundamental insurance for businesses that covers the costs and compensation to your client if you've made a mistake in your design or advice, now or in the past, that ends up with them losing money.

The mistakes you make might not be discovered immediately - in fact the client typically has 7 years to make a claim against your professional indemnity insurance (sometimes longer), if they think that your negligence is to blame. 

Mistakes can be anything from being negligent, not providing reasonable care, giving bad advice, creating a design that isn’t fit for purpose; or even accidentally using someone else’s intellectual property, like photos, without proper copyright attribution.

Professional Indemnity insurance also covers your costs of a claim, including all the legal expenses, even if you did nothing wrong. So even if you know that you haven't made any mistakes, a client can still make that allegation against you. 

Without professional indemnity insurance, your time can suddenly be caught up with finding lawyers to help you, bringing them up to speed with what you worked on and arguing your case. The costs will start building up, while at the same time you are now losing out on time to do real paid work, so suffering a double financial penalty. All of these risks are removed with professional indemnity insurance.

Professional Indemnity insurance, also known as PI Insurance, Errors & Omissions Insurance or even Professional Liability insurance has been well understood in traditional businesses such as architects. It is easy to see the mistakes that an architect makes - if a bridge doesn’t meet in the middle for instance, you can’t paper that over!

However, as modern professions have expanded and grown, particularly in the service industry, professional indemnity insurance covers a wide range of professions, such as software developers, management consultants, marketing professionals and more.

At Dinghy we cover over 200 modern professionals, giving them a world first in on-demand professional indemnity insurance.