Professional Liability (E&O) Insurance

What Is Professional Liability?

Professional Liability Insurance, also known as Errors and Omissions Insurance, protects you or your business when a client holds you responsible for professional service or advice that they believe didn’t perform as promised.

Many contractors and businesses have Commercial General Liability Insurance, but this type of policy only covers third-party bodily injury or property damage. It does not provide cover for financial damages resulting from services or advice offered in a professional capacity. That’s where Professional Liability or Errors and Omissions Insurance comes into play.

Professional Liability Insurance is different from Commercial General Liability Insurance: they are triggered by different types of losses and the policies are structured differently with respect to how they respond to claims. Most Commercial General Liability Insurance policies are written as an “occurrence” form; whereas Professional Liability Insurance policies are usually written as “claims made” policies.

The industry standard is for insurance companies to offer Professional Liability coverage on a “claims made and reported” form. This means that the policy will only respond to claims made against you and reported to the insurer within the policy term.

The EasyCover Professional Liability Insurance policy follows the industry standard and is written as a Claims Made form, however, we offer an unlimited retroactive date. This means we will respond to new allegations/claims made against you for past work which was done before you purchased your EasyCover policy as long as: a) you only became aware of the grievance against you during the policy term and b) the claim is reported to us during the policy term. Many other Professional Liability policies set the retroactive date to the policy inception date, meaning you would not have coverage for work that you did before the insurance policy’s inception date.