LEGAL MALPRACTICE INSURANCE APPLICATION

LEGAL MALPRACTICE INSURANCE APPLICATION

Legal Malpractice Insurance Application: apply online, or download 1-page form below. Get fast, free quotes from all major “A”-rated insurers.

Online:
•Family Law Online Application
•Injury Law Online Application (plaintiff Med. Mal., Personal Injury, SSDI, Work. Comp.)
•IP Law Online Application
•Real Estate Law Online Application
•Trusts & Estates Law Online Application
•All Other Practice Areas Online Application

Download:
•Employment Law firms
•Family Law firms
•Immigration Law firms
•Injury Law firms: plaintiff Med. Mal., Personal Injury, SSDI, Workers Comp.
•Intellectual Property Law firms
•Tax Law firms
•Trusts-Estates-Wills-Elder Law firms
•All Other firms

Fast Facts:

  • Most sole practitioners will pay $500 – $1,000 for their first policy.  A 2-atty. firm will pay slightly less than double that; a 3-atty. firm, slightly less than triple that, etc. Premiums are 25% – 50% higher in NYC, NJ, Miami-area, LA-area, and San Francisco-area; up to 35% lower in rural areas.
  • The premium is based mainly on your firm’s atty. count, practice areas, policy limits, and county/state.
  • Criminal defense lawyers pay the least, then immigration; family and business; bankruptcy and employment; PI, real estate, and trusts-estates, and patent, securities, and class action lawyers, who pay the most.
  • Most solos buy policy limits of $100,000 per claim/$300,000 annual aggregate, or $250,000/$500,000, which costs about 30% more. Each higher level of limits – $500,000/$1,000,000, $1,000,000/$1,000,000, etc. – costs another 10% – 25%.
  • Attorneys who practice 26 or fewer hours per week, qualify for a part-time rate, which will reduce the premium by 35% – 50%.

Apply, Quote, Buy:

  • Fill out our short on-line application or download it below.
  • We’ll send your firm’s application to all viable insurers, based on its risk profile (firm size, practice areas, county, etc.), and request proposals at different limits and deductibles, so you can make the optimal choice.
  • Some insurers allow brokers to input a firm’s application, and receive instant quotes. We’ll email you those insurers’ quotes, shortly after you apply, and advise you if any of them are the best available, or if you’re better off waiting a few days, for the other insurers to offer proposals.
  • We’ll explain the coverage and policy limits, answer your questions, and send you any insurer’s policy to review, if desired.
  • To accept any of the instant quotes, sign the quote sheet that we’ll email you. To accept a proposal from an insurer that doesn’t offer instant quotes, you’ll have to complete its long application to receive a binding quote, which should match the proposal. We’ll fill it out to the extent possible, based on the online application that you completed, and send it to you to finish.
  • If you accept any insurer’s binding quote, your coverage will be in place.
  • Pay the premium in full or finance it (10% down, followed by 11 monthly payments).

Contact me, if you have any questions or want help with our online application:

Curt Cooper, Managing Broker
(202) 802-6415 | ccooper ‘at’ lawyersinsurer.com
Licensed Insurance Producer in CA, DC, NJ, NY, OH, PA, etc.
National Association of Insurance Commissioners #1017031

Ia. Legal Malpractice Insurance Application – Help for First-Time Buyers

1. Practice areas grid: allocate your billings by percentage per practice area, i.e., 30% family law, 20% personal injury law, etc. Your answers will greatly affect the premium.

If your firm has been open for a year or more, then fill out the grid based on your gross billings for the last 12 months. If it’s been open less than 12 months, fill out the grid based on your billings to date, plus your projections for the remainder of your first 12 months.

The application asks when your firm was founded, so the insurers will know if your figures are projections, and they won’t penalize you, if your projections turn out to be inaccurate. When your policy renews next year, you’ll have a year of data, and will be able to report your practice areas accurately.

Your coverage won’t be restricted to the practice areas that you list on the application.

2. Risk management: docket/calendaring, conflicts-checking, and use of engagement letters/non-engagement/termination letters.

You won’t get quotes unless you have at least basic risk management procedures in place, so don’t apply until you do.

Even if you don’t handle litigated matters, and thus don’t need a docketing system, you’ll still have deadlines to meet, and the insurers will expect you to use a primary and back-up calendar.

If you answer the questions “no”, i.e., you don’t use any calendaring or conflicts-checking tools, or a retainer agreement or engagement letter, then every insurer will decline your application. See #19 on our FAQs page for a list of acceptable tools. Some manual tools are listed, but computerized tools, i.e., practice management software, are preferred.

   3. Back-up attorney: most insurers require sole practitioners to have a back-up; several insurers require the back-up’s name and address.

The person’s role is to contact your clients and any other relevant parties, and obtain any necessary postponement/extension until you return, if you incur an accident, illness, etc., that leaves you unable to handle your cases. In an extreme situation, the back-up will arrange for replacement counsel, or take over your cases, although that’s not required.

There’s virtually no liability risk, because the back-up doesn’t establish an atty.-client relationship, unless he/she takes over the cases.

Any attorney barred in your state of domicile will suffice. Most attorneys turn to a former colleague as their back-up.

Ib. How Our Process Benefits You

Does your firm have the best possible terms on its malpractice insurance, i.e., the broadest coverage at the lowest price?

The only way to find out is to test the market.

That’s where we come in.

We submit each firm’s application to all viable insurers, based on its risk profile – typically 7 – 10 – and obtain proposals at the firm’s current terms, and at policy limits one or more levels higher. If the best proposals are close, we solicit another round of proposals from the ‘finalists’.

This aggressive comparison shopping lets us consistently obtain much better coverage and pricing for firms than they currently have.

More than a dozen major insurers cover law firms, and they compete fiercely for good risks. If your firm hasn’t incurred a claim in five or more years, and hasn’t shopped for competing quotes in two or more years, then one or more of those insurers will likely offer it much better terms than it currently has.

Attorney Protective, AXA, CNA, Markel, and Zurich usually offer the best terms.

To obtain no-cost, no-obligation quotes from these and other ‘A’-rated legal malpractice insurers, send us your most recent application, or complete our short application, either online or by downloading it.

We’ll help you compare the competing quotes to your current terms, and make the best decision.

There’s no risk, and a potentially great reward.

The forms below are in portable document format (PDF), for which you must have  Adobe Reader. You can download it here: Get.Adobe.com/Reader

LEGAL MALPRACTICE INSURANCE APPLICATION – PRACTICE AREA SUPPLEMENTSbbbbbbb

If 1% or more of your practice is in any of the following areas, please complete the supplemental application below.

Supplemental Application – Banking/Financial Institutions

Supplemental Application – Business Transactions (Word document)

Supplemental Application – Class Actions/Mass Torts/MDL

Supplemental Application – Entertainment

Supplemental Application – Family Law  (Word document)
Allocate your Family Law billables among Divorce, Guardianship, etc. Ignore the rest of the form. 

Supplemental Application – Intellectual Property

Supplemental Application – Plaintiffs’ Personal Injury

Supplemental Application – Real Estate

Supplemental Application – Securities

Supplemental Application – Tax (scroll down to p.3)

Supplemental Application – Title Agency

Supplemental Application – Trusts & Estates

LEGAL MALPRACTICE INSURANCE APPLICATION – OTHER SUPPLEMENTS
If you’ve been involved in any malpractice claim or suit in the last five years, or are aware of an incident which may give rise to a claim, please complete the form below for each claim or incident.

Supplemental Application – Malpractice Claim Information

If you’ve been the subject of bar grievance or other disciplinary proceeding, please complete the form below.

Supplemental Appplication – Bar Grievance or Discipline

If any lawyer in your firm currently serves as director, officer, trustee or partner of any entity which is a client of the firm, or has held an equity or financial interest in a client in the last five years, please complete the Outside Interests supplement below.

Supplemental Application – Outside Interests

If you have more than one office, please complete the Additional Locations supplement below.

Supplemental Application – Additional Locations

If you share office space with one or more attorneys who aren’t affiliated with your firm, please complete the Office-Sharing supplement below.

Supplemental Application – Office Sharing

LEGAL MALPRACTICE INSURANCE APPLICATION – OTHER REQUIRED DOCUMENTS

If your firm currently has malpractice insurance, then addition to the application, please send us the following documents, as we must provide them to insurers to obtain pro-posals for you:

*A copy of the Declarations page from your firm’s current policy, which is the first page (it says “Declarations” on it). 

*The Individual Prior Acts Retroactive Date Endorsement from the firm’s current policy. It lists each attorney and his/her retroactive date, which is how far back their coverage extends (it’s usually the same as the attorney’s date of hire, or for the founding attorney(s), the date the firm opened). If there’s a separate Prior Acts endorsement for the firm, please provide that as well.

You can either print, scan, and email these documents to us, or email us the entire policy, which will entail less effort. (After the Declarations page are the endorsements, most of which are common to every policy, and the “boilerplate” contract language that’s in all of the insurer’s legal malpractice policies).  

LEGAL MALPRACTICE INSURANCE APPLICATION – OTHER REQUIRED DOCUMENTS IF YOUR FIRM’S MALPRACTICE COVERAGE HAS BEEN NON-RENEWED

We’ll also need these documents to obtain quotes for you:

*A copy of the non-renewal notice that the current insurer sent to your firm.

*A loss run, which is a summary of the firm’s claims activity printed on the insurer’s letterhead. It lists all claims that the firm has reported to that insurer, the total dollars the insurer has paid to resolve each closed claim, and the amounts it has both paid to date and posted in reserve for each open claim.

You can obtain it by emailing either your insurer’s customer service department or the person who sent you the non-renewal notice; be sure to include your firm’s policy number.

WHERE TO SEND YOUR COMPLETED LEGAL MALPRACTICE INSURANCE APPLICATION

Please email completed applications to Curt Cooper: ccooper “at” lawyersinsurer.com. If you have any questions, send an email, or call 202-802-6415.

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