Category: Finance, Insurance.
You get insurance in order to protect yourself from disaster. The same thinking is often applied to business, where owners have equipment to be safeguarded, payroll to be managed, and all other types of business assets and concerns that need to be covered, too.
When you think of disaster and insurance, you think of bad weather, or a number, stolen goods of other unforeseen physical mishaps that can ruin your business if you re not covered. In other words, when people think of insurance for themselves or their business, they think of the physical things that can go wrong with that business, and getting coverage to cover those range of possibilities. The problem is that, with today s business environment, it s just not forward- thinking enough. It s pretty straight forward, and even forward, common sense- thinking to a degree. For business professionals in particular, it s probably only half the equation when it comes to getting yourself and your business properly insured. Errors and Omissions insurance.
E& O Insurance. Ever heard of it? Not having it could cost you dearly. If you re a professional, you better hear of it. E& O insurance, as it s called, essentially protects the business professional from lawsuits arising from real or perceived misconduct resulting from the normal conduct of business. E& O insurance is also known as professional liability insurance, and the reason liability ought to be of such concern to the business owner is related to the very nature of conducting business in and of itself. It goes beyond the kind of insurance most people are used to because it covers aspects of a business that impact others when interacting with the public.
Unlike private individuals and their families, businesses are specifically set up to interact with the public as a matter of routine. You set up a business in order to meet a demand that exists out there in the public. You normally don t provide a good or a service to a small circle of friends. That involves interacting with the public and performing exchanges with them in ways that may be even hard for you to perceive. This is why things like e& o insurance are necessary. The extent to which a business or a professional can have an impact on the public can almost literally be unimaginable. Say you re a lawyer.
That client then turns around and uses that counsel as a basis to form a contract with a third party. You provide legal counsel to a client. That third party and its contract provide services to the public. Well, it s possible that the claim can be traced all the way back to the original counsel provided to the client. Someone from that public believes themselves to be hurt or damaged as a result of that service. It may seem improbable.
Errors real and perceived can end up costing you. But just think how many frivolous lawsuits are in existence. This is a component of liability insurance that many business owner and professionals might not come to fully appreciate until it s too late. The last thing you want to happen in this regard is to have errors and omissions appraisers come to your door and tell you you re not covered for a particular mistake that comes back to haunt you. This includes e& o insurance. Quite literally, the cost could not only be your business, but your reputation as a professional as well. A plumber might install a wrong kind of pipe.
It s not only errors or mistakes that professionals conduct in the normal practice of business. A doctor might prescribe the wrong type of medication- which gets malpractice liability involved for the professional as well. This stuff happens, and errors and omissions appraisers will usually deal with these kinds of issues as a matter of routine. An IT professional might install the wrong type of software for a computer system. Where some of the unforeseen difficulty lies with the conduct of a professional is the possibility of errors or omissions that are simply perceived as such by individuals affected by what you do. You might ask, well how does that work? In other words, it s not only the real mistakes that you make as a professional that can come back to bite you, it s the mistakes people think you make that can cost you dearly, too- especially if you don t have e& o insurance.
Think about it. There s also the possibility that you ll lose a case because a jury doesn t like you, even though you didn t technically do anything wrong. If somebody just thinks your professional conduct cost them harm or injury, you ll need to hire lawyers yourself, which can mean considerable legal fees in and of themselves. Just being in the right, or thinking you re being in the right isn t enough. There is also the possibility that, even though damages were the result of an error incorrectly perceived as such by another party, that they re deemed as damages nonetheless. You need a jury to think so, and that can, too sometimes be like rolling the dice at an all- night casino game.
In other words, damages from perceived errors are still damages, and somebody might be seen as having been responsible. Unless you have e& o insurance that covers such possibilities, the last people who will want to be your friends in a crisis are those pesky errors and omissions appraisers. That somebody might be you. They won t necessarily care about what s right, they ll care about what they have to cover.
Read more...
Adventure Also Means Increased Chances Of Events That May Affect Your Health Adversely At Times - Wanda Latour's Finance and Insurance blog:
If you are planning to settle abroad, you need to also take a good look at your expatriate health care policy.
As For DFA And IFA It Was Endowment With Critical Illness Insurance That Brought Success - Finance and Insurance:
According to Dinani A and others( March 2000) "A Critical Review" , in the year 1998, almost two thirds of critical illness sales were mortgage related. There was a big difference in critical illness sales amount according to how companies sold the product.
Home Insurance Quotes Are Rated On Many Factors Including Post Code, Type Of Property, Occupation, And Age Of Property - Finance and Insurance Articles:
The recent severe weather has brought misery to many people as a result of unprecedented levels of flooding.