Steven O’Sullivan surveys solicitors’ professional indemnity insurance
With recent hard markets, practitioners (especially those who are lucky and/or diligent enough to experience few or no claims) might wonder what insurers are doing to earn their increasing premiums, especially those who are lucky and/or diligent enough to experience few or no claims. Practitioners may therefore be interested to know about the experience of those of us who defend solicitors against claims, which naturally range from the nonsensical or outrageous to those where we are hard pushed to say anything in reply except maybe a challenge to the quantum of interest.
Lender claims
The big news over the recent years has been lender claims. Mortgage fraud and solicitors’ failings to lenders did not vanish between 1995 and 2005, but were masked by rising house prices meaning that repossession could take place without loss to the lender. Therefore, lender claims were a rarity.
With at best stagnant values since 2007, the lenders reaped the reward of poor lending decisions in the form of losses on repossession while solicitors pay the resultant claims
