Every professional who gives advice or design to their clients should buy Professional Indemnity insurance.
Even if you haven’t done anything wrong, just paying the legal bill to defend yourself from an allegation your client has made can cost thousands of pounds, and take up a great deal of time. Time that you are better spent working, and making a living, rather than bogged down with arguments.
Professional Indemnity insurance will take care of all the bills, as well as compensation for your client. In fact, our insurance pays the expenses in addition to whatever limit you buy so even if the lawyers end up talking a lot, (which they can do!), the amount required to fix the problem stays untouched by legal expenses.
Example of Professional Indemnity claims
One of my favourite examples is from a fortune teller. The claim itself is not nice - they gave some terrible advice to a customer, advising that they had a terminal illness. The patient was very upset, spent a lot of money on tests and repeat tests only to conclude that they were in fact totally healthy. So they sued the fortune teller and the professional indemnity insurers paid out as the fortune teller gave bad advice. You could argue that a fortune teller should have known they were wrong, but I like to think that the fortune teller had the foresight to know they would make a mistake and so bought Professional Indemnity insurance!
A more down to earth example is that of a designer who printed a leaflet, and forgot to account for the page ordering. So the full print run of leaflets had to be thrown away, resulting in large reprint costs and associated delay costs.
Or one that sticks in the minds of many a Londoner - when the Millennium bridge between South Bank and St. Paul’s Cathedral opened it quickly became known as the “wobbly bridge” as the design didn’t factor in what happens when people walked on it…!
Why Dinghy Professional Indemnity insurance?
At Dinghy, we can insure over 200 types of professionals and have partnered with global professional indemnity experts to be able to help you as soon as you think there's a problem. It is better to talk to us straight away, then try and resolve it yourself.