Paying less for your professional indemnity insurance is within your grasp, says David Ingall
Whether you like it or not professional indemnity insurance is a compulsory requirement of practising as a solicitor. It can be expensive, intrusive and a constant reminder of our own shortcomings, but we are grateful it is there when things go wrong.
Information provided by Lockton, a specialist professional indemnity broker to the legal profession, suggests that larger firms (typically eight-partner plus and probably £8m of fees) in the last round of renewals paid premiums of 1.1% of fees and smaller firms (typically £1.8m of fees) paid premiums of 2.3% of fees. This, of course, takes no account of levels of cover or excesses. While each firm is assessed on a case by case basis, this sampling supports the information gathered in the UK200 Legal Group survey.
There is an immense variation in the marketplace and there are signs that premiums will harden (the polite euphemism for premiums going up). Now is the time to review
