Professional Indemnity Insurance Australia
You are a professional and you are extremely careful when providing professional services. However, life and business can be unpredictable and knowingly or unknowingly, you might make a mistake. Even seemingly innocuous mistakes have the potential to significantly hurt your business. Therefore, it is recommended to get professional indemnity insurance cover to protect your business, your reputation and your livelihood.
This type of cover is specifically to cover individuals and businesses that offer professional services. The main purpose of this insurance cover is to keep you safe from legal costs as well as claims for damages that might arise from omission, act or breach of duty while providing professional services.
Simply put, this insurance is designed to ensure that you won’t have to spend huge amounts of money in legal costs in case your business is accused of causing loss to a client. This can be anything ranging from mistakes made in filing tax for a client or failure to book a venue or anything in between. In case your client files a claim against your business for mistakes made in your professional capacity, this type of insurance cover will help you protect your business from potentially damaging legal costs. Do not forget that you might end up spending a fortune on defence even if the claim eventually turns out to be false.
We Will Source You Multiple Professional Indemnity Insurance Quotes
We have offices in several Australian cities and offer a number of insurance services which means we regularly deal with multiple insurance providers. Our experienced team of professionals will help you get the right insurance cover by sourcing multiple insurance quotes from multiple providers.
How Much Professional Indemnity Cover Do I Need?
Since every business is different, the insurance needed for each business is also different. In many cases, the amount of insurance cover your business needs will depend on the contract. For example, you might be required to have a certain amount of PI cover as dictated by the contract with a particular client. There are policies that offer cover ranging from $250,000 to upwards of $10 million.
The amount of cover your business will need depend on the statutory requirements for your profession. This includes the potential risks and potential costs to rectify mistakes, the value of the work performed by you, and legal and investigation costs of a particular action taken against your business among other things.
Simply put, it will depend on an independent assessment of the risk your business is potentially exposed to.
Who Needs Professional Indemnity Insurance?
This type of insurance coverage is needed by any professional who provides advice for a living. In other words, a professional working in any industry has a responsibility to provide quality advice or services. As a professional, you may be liable to pay for losses in case the service or advice provided by you to your client turn out to be incorrect.
Common examples include engineers, architects, marketing specialists, bookkeepers, accountants, lawyers, life coaches, event managers and agricultural consultants among others.
What Should I look out for in a Professional Indemnity Insurance Policy?
There are several insurance providers that offer PI insurance but it does not mean that you should go out and choose the first insurance provider you come across. A PI insurance policy should protect you from:
Legal costs involved in defending yourself when a client takes legal action against you or
any settlements or judgements against you or your business
You need to make sure that the insurance policy covers you for public relation costs, claims investigation costs, legal costs, court attendance costs as well as damage costs awarded against you among others.
Final Word
It has been observed that many professionals often underestimate the legal costs associated with professional indemnity claims even if the claim made against them is false. There have been cases where professionals have to fork out close to $1 million over several years to defend themselves against a professional indemnity claim.
