How counselling professional indemnity cover guards against legal claims
Getting an insurance policy in place to help you guard against legal risks may sound unusual, but it is taken out by many businesses offering professional advice. A counsellor may be vulnerable to legal challenges alleging they have made avoidable mistakes, so a counselling professional indemnity cover policy could help protect your business in the long run.
This might sound quite complicated and expensive, but the basics of the market are quite simple. Professional indemnity cover protects the policyholder if they face a legal claim that they have made a mistake. Typically it will cover accidental breach of confidentiality, unintentional breach of copyright, or acts of negligence and even things like unintentional defamation.
In the right set of circumstances any of this might lead to a solicitor getting involved, and then you have the chance of being sued on your hands. This means hiring a legal team of your own, which could cost a considerate amount of cash. Counselling professional indemnity cover would pick up the cost of hiring help, and can even pay compensation to a successful claimant.
There are certain limits attached to policies, meaning that they will not pay out for ever. This means there is a risk of being under insured if you do not get the right policy. For example, if you had a policy protects you for £200,000 worth of legal bills, but then face a court case which ends up costing you £110,000, you would have to make up the £10,000 difference. This is known as being under insured. Bigger companies tend to take out bigger policies, possibly protecting them for millions of pounds worth of legal bills.
You will need to make a cover decision based on the type of client you deal with and the size of your business. An insurance company may be able to guide you towards what might be the best policy for you. One of the benefits of counselling professional indemnity cover is that it does not matter whether or not the claim levelled against you is true or not. You policy will work on your behalf regardless. So say someone approached you for treatment with a psychiatric problem which then worsened after they began consulting you, they may make a legal claim, and in such circumstances your policy would pay for your legal defence.
Should you lose a case and the client be awarded compensation, a policy will even cover the costs of this. Again certain limits will apply, but this means you would not have to dip into your own pocket to comply with the court’s order.
Counselling professional indemnity cover can even be arranged to cover retrospective incidents, which are levelled against you and refer to something which happened before the policy was bought. This ensures you are even protected against things which happened before you were sought cover
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