Why Health & Safety Consultant Professional indemnity cover is relevant
When it comes to legal claims, it is easy to adopt what might be thought of as the ‘it will never happen to me’ mentality. But a claim for compensation, for example, can wreck your business, so it is important get the right sort of cover in place. Due to the nature of their business, health and safety consultants are arguably particularly at risk. Health & safety consultant professional indemnity cover can help protect you against some of the regular types of legal challenges.
Say you are hired by a company with a large factory, which asks you to come on site and make recommendations about a compliance with the law and approve measures which are designed to keep employees safe. If your assessment contains an error, an employee could later be injured leading to the possibility of being sued. If a firm thinks you may be responsible in some way for an incident like this, many will not hesitate to seek legal advice.
Any court case can be a distressing experience, but it can also be financially damaging. Health & safety consultant professional indemnity cover will pay your legal costs up to an agreed limit, meaning your defence does not have to mean financial difficulty for your business. Excesses can also be agreed, as with more conventional forms of cover, and can help bring down the premium.
The limit of a policy is agreed as it is taken out, and it will be up to you to decide what level of cover you want. Obviously, the higher the payout limits, the higher the premium in most cases. Companies which deal with high-profile clients may want a greater level of protection, while smaller businesses may not need quite as much.
This type of policy normally protects against other things like unintentional defamation, breach of copyright or confidence, and even the dishonesty of your company’s employees, should they, for example, steal from a client. It will also pay out regardless of how valid the claimant’s allegations are – your eligibility for cover will not be affected by the strength of the opposition’s claims against you.
One of the benefits of this type insurance is that it will also pay out any compensation which happens to be awarded to a claimant which is successful. Again this will be subject to certain limits, but provided you’re not under insured, you may not have to pay a penny towards a company yourself.
Health & safety consultant professional indemnity cover can also include public liability insurance as an extra, and can even be arranged so that it guards against any past events which apply to before you bought the policy. If you decide to retire or run down a business, you can also get cover which continues after you have ceased trading, protecting you against future claims.
Comments
Leave a Reply