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This week I thought I would talk about insurance. Whenever you use a qualified solicitor you get quality assurance and when I talk about qualified solicitors I mean a proper professional one not one of the cheap imitations that there are about nowadays. The fact that they are the real qualified deal should mean that mistakes are almost unheard of, but if you are unlucky enough to suffer from a mistake by a solicitor the solicitor always has insurance to compensate you for any loss you suffer as a result. So you really can't lose.
This insurance is what we lawyers call professional indemnity insurance, or pii for short. The Law Society has a firm rule that all solicitors have to have it or they cannot practice, full stop. They even insist that it has to be renewed on 1st October every year, which means that every September solicitors nationwide scramble to get their pii renewal sorted out for another year.
Imagine if there was a law that said all car insurance policies had to be renewed at the same time every year. The insurance industry would probably collapse under the strain at renewal time, and then sit around with not enough to do the rest of the year. That's exactly how it is in the legal professional insurance world. Its crackers but that's the Law Society and its rules for you.
When I first entered this profession any client who had the temerity to suggest that a solicitor had not done the very finest of jobs would be given very short shrift indeed. Nowadays the powers that be tell us all that has changed. I am not totally convinced. There is nowadays a veneer of platitudes and fine words about client care and owning up to errors and putting it right, but in truth when you scratch beneath the surface the old attitudes prevail. That is part of the reason why I feel proud that we at my firm always try to help someone who has had a problem with another solicitor. It doesn't make us very popular, but we care about professional standards for people not about popularity contests.
There is another point to this and that is that not everyone involved in legal services is a solicitor or has professional indemnity insurance. You must be aware of this and not assume people like will writers or probate practitioners are solicitors or have professional indemnity insurance. Some can often charge the same as a solicitor but do not have the same qualifications or give their clients any protection if something goes wrong.
Meanwhile every client of every solicitor in the country has the comfort of knowing that if the solicitor drops a clanger they will be compensated. To me, that's what being a true professional is all about.
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- If you have a legal query that you think might be interesting to other readers too please send it to me at Horsforth Law Office, New Road Side, Horsforth, T: 0113 258 6888 or email john.wilson@LawOffice.co.uk
- If you have a query about a legal matter that you think might be interesting to other readers too, please send it to me. My contact info: 23-25 Station Road, Horsforth, Leeds, LS18 5PA, phone 0113-258-6888, website www.lawoffice.co.uk, email john.wilson@lawoffice.co.uk.