Professional Liability Insurance
Professional Liability Insurance
(OP)
Who do you have carrying your professional liability insurance? I just started, obviously with no money, and it seems that no one wants to cover you, or it is very expensive. How did you start with this insurance delimma?
RE: Professional Liability Insurance
RE: Professional Liability Insurance
RE: Professional Liability Insurance
JIM
RE: Professional Liability Insurance
Liability Insurance for being clumsy and knocking over a ladder which crashes into a machine and temporarily halts production and requires repair money is cheap. I paid $300/yr for $1M coverage.
Then there is Errors & Ommissions Insurance (E&O) which covers stupid design screwups which makes buildings collapse, thus causing a sharp increase in the happy/sad lawyer ratio. You pay through the nose for that when you first start out. It's the industry's method of sifting through the people who are serious about starting a consulting engineering firm.
TygerDawg
Blue Technik LLC
Advanced Robotics & Automation Engineering
www.bluetechnik.com
RE: Professional Liability Insurance
Don Phillips
http://worthingtonengineering.com
RE: Professional Liability Insurance
State Farm has it for about $200-$300.
$1M E&O may or may not be enough, depending on what you do. If you are in strutural, and structure collapses, $1M doesn't cover you for much.
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Albert Einstein
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RE: Professional Liability Insurance
My business is strictly HVAC; I would imagine that the rate for structural might be more.
---KenRad
RE: Professional Liability Insurance
The insurance premium is also dependent on the type of work the engineer is doing. Therefore, it may be inappropriate to discuss insurance premiums for engineering services other than what the original poster intends to provide and which I assume is structural work. Insurance premiums also depend on the amount of work or billings.
The original poster needs to talk to an insurer or broker that specializes in professional liability insurance and have past and future billing information available to obtain a quote.
RE: Professional Liability Insurance
RE: Professional Liability Insurance
I'm not sure what folks are getting for $4500, but I've tried to get insurance through ASME, SPE, and AARP (really) and they were all in the same ballpark as I'm paying. The consumer-oriented insurers (i.e., State Farm, Farmers, Allstate, GEICO, etc.) won't even talk to me (they say it's because of my industry).
David
RE: Professional Liability Insurance
Don Phillips
http://worthingtonengineering.com
RE: Professional Liability Insurance
Structural work definitely drives up the E&O costs compared to general civil type work, or even most mechanical work. Some companies will not quote coverage structural type work. I found that the rates through ASME were similar to what I could find on the street but shop each year.
To answer the original question, coverage through ASME or ASCE seems to be a nice route for the start-up.