Professional liability: Conversation starters

If so, it’s essential for you to hold robust professional liability (PL), also known as errors and omissions (E&O) coverage. This cover helps to defend and resolve claims made against you for acts, errors and omissions that you allegedly made in the provision of your professional service.

Professional services can be anything from consulting and administration in an office setting to providing recommendations, project management and supervision on a construction site. Building design, engineering and staffing are other professional services where professional liability is an essential protection.

Professional service providers often need more than just professional liability cover. General liability (GL), cyber and contents cover are other key coverages for today’s professionals, and to make things easy they can be combined into one simple package policy. This not only makes a huge difference in terms of administration, time and cost, but it also helps to prevent ‘finger pointing’ between insurers whenever a claim does arise. 

CFC offers a broad modular package with PL, GL, cyber and contents sections that can have their own separate limit of liability. This solution provides broad coverage for the professional and office exposures as well as the overlap that occurs between coverages.

Hiring third-party contractors can mean you are at risk of being held vicariously liable for errors or omissions of those providing services on your behalf. This is especially important in the professional services and construction sectors. CFC offers vicarious liability coverage for errors and omissions committed on behalf of the insured.

For a higher level of protection, in certain cases, CFC can extend full primary coverage to your subcontractors, covering them as if they are your own employees.

If so, you need general liability (GL) cover. This helps protect you from any liability you could incur resulting from property damage and bodily injury to third parties you interact with as part of your business activities. While any professional who is interacting with clients and other third parties should consider purchasing GL cover, it is especially important for those entering potentially busy or hazardous job sites to do so.

Construction managers, environmental consultants and energy consultants are just three examples of clients who would benefit from a GL policy.

Even if your service delivery method is largely traditional in nature, software applications are becoming part of almost every trade on the planet. This reliance can mean that if software fails or a cyber event occurs such as a ransomware attack, it could result in system downtime, data loss, reputation harm, legal expenses and so on. CFC can seamlessly include cover for your technology products and services liability as well as cyber cover which extends to business interruption, should your proprietary software, or your third-party software vendor, suffer a cyber attack.

The increased adoption and utilization of electronic payment methods open the door to cyber risk, making professional service firms a prime target for cybercriminals. One of the most frequent sources of cyber claims is fund transfer fraud, which is achieved by methods such as hacking accounts, social engineering to be someone else and phishing emails.

These scams are becoming more sophisticated and even harder to spot as they often come from real email addresses and mimic victims’ behaviors. Payments are often transferred quickly into other accounts and banks rarely replace the losses. 

It’s essential for any professional service provider to hold cybercrime cover, and it’s never been easier to attain. With CFC, it can be added to your policy as part of our PL package, or purchased as a standalone policy.

Fast service, combined with experienced underwriters can make a world of difference. The same applies to mid-term adjustments, CFC aims to make this process as quick and smooth as possible to allow for unparalleled service times and 24- hour turnaround in the majority of cases.

When operating across borders, rules and regulations can vary significantly. The CFC professions policy offers comprehensive legal action cover that includes protection for suits brought anywhere in the world as standard and covers activities performed in overseas territories where declared.

Could it lead to more than just a client requesting a refund? In many industries, mistakes by professional service providers can result in serious financial and non-financial consequences. 

CFC’s professional indemnity cover goes beyond just reimbursing financial loss. It encompasses a wide range of protections including a standard trigger for contingent bodily injury and property damage, as well as cover for pollution liability, infringement of intellectual property rights, and more.

Our CFC professions wording provides coverage for claims made against you for defamation committed by you, including but not limited to libel, slander, trade libel, product disparagement, injurious falsehood, emotional distress or outrage based on harm to the character or reputation of any person or entity arising out of your business activities.

This can feel like a headache, but it does not need to be. CFC’s policy includes blanket additional insured and waiver of subrogation (WOS) as standard, so long as your contract with your client requires you to name them as an additional insured, or have a waiver of subrogation in their favor. If the client requires written confirmation then we can always provide an AI or WOS endorsement specifically highlighting this.

Not holding cyber insurance and proactive protection services in today’s world poses an existential risk to any business—with cyber incidents becoming increasingly costly to manage. 

CFC makes it convenient and affordable to purchase robust cyber coverage by allowing you to request a cyber option alongside your professional indemnity quote. This package solution includes privacy liability, breach notification costs, system damage and system business interruption cover, award-winning cybercrime protection, access to our proactive cyber attack prevention and unrivalled incident response services. This cover helps to protect you from extortion, electronic compromise, and social engineering, the main triggers of cyber claims.

Many ransomware attacks stem from cybercriminals exploiting remote access solutions, whether by identifying a weakness in a virtual private network (VPN) to gain access, conducting brute force attacks which crack simple passwords or by using stolen login credentials. Similarly, funds transfer fraud scams often rely on cybercriminals gaining remote access to employee email accounts to perpetrate their scams.

With CFC’s cybercrime cover and proactive prevention services, you can have greater peace of mind when working both at your office and remotely.