Professional Indemnity: cover by professionals, for professionals

If clients pay for your expertise, they can also sue over it. Professional Indemnity (PI) insurance exists for exactly that moment — when a client alleges that your advice, design, audit or service caused them financial loss.

Who needs PI?

Any professional whose work others rely on: accountants and auditors, attorneys, engineers and architects, quantity surveyors, IT consultants, estate agents, brokers and financial advisers. In many of these professions, PI cover is a regulatory or contractual requirement — in all of them, it is the difference between an allegation being a process and being a catastrophe.

What does it actually pay for?

Two things, and the second is the one people underestimate. First, damages or settlements you become legally liable to pay. Second — and often larger — the legal costs of defending the claim, which PI policies fund as they are incurred. A successfully defended claim can still cost hundreds of thousands in fees; PI absorbs that.

The claims-made trap

PI policies respond to claims made during the policy period, not when the work was done. That makes continuity critical: your retroactive date must reach back to when you started practising, and if you retire or close the practice, run-off cover keeps you protected for work already delivered. These details are precisely where an experienced broker earns their keep.

Westwood structures PI for professionals across KwaZulu-Natal and beyond. If your limit, retroactive date or run-off position has never been properly reviewed, that is worth a conversation.