Professional Indemnity Insurance

Examples of professional indemnity insurance claims

General claims

• Losing or misplacing confidential documents.
• Accidentally sending an email to an unauthorised person, leading to your client suing you for breach of confidentiality.
• Using a copyrighted image or photo without getting the appropriate rights or licence.

Accountants

• Advising a client regarding the transfer of funds to family members, and the client later becoming liable for paying capital gains tax.
• Failing to carry out a required audit.

Engineers and tradesmen

• Making a mistake in measurements that results in additional costs to rebuild, or causes damage during or after construction.
• Installing lighting that is later found to be non-compliant with regulation, and therefore needs to be redone.
• Designing a machine that proves inadequate to cope with the weight of items it is meant to produce.

Media professionals

• Designing and running a direct marketing campaign, where the brochures were wrongly addressed. The client claims damages for loss of revenue.
• Creating work using the wrong Pantone colour for the client’s logo, with client claiming costs to reproduce the work.

Estate agents

• A client claiming that you undersold a property, and several months later it’s resold for 120% of the previous price.

Quantity surveyor

• A surveyor forecasts cost for the construction of a number of restaurants at the start of each project. The client claims that the monthly and year-end costings and forecasts were inadequate, making the contracts non-viable.

Travel agents

• Failing to arrange travel insurance for a client who falls ill while on holiday in Africa, claiming medical bills and expenses.

Safety consultants

• A person injuring himself by falling from scaffolding you approved.

Interior designers

• Designing the layout of office premises and the client claiming that this was not in accordance with their requirements.

Town planners

• Giving the wrong advice about planning permission on a plot of land.