For both the broking and insurer communities professional indemnity is a booming business
The trend is for poaching the best recruits and paying top salaries.
There is a marked shortage of people with experience, which exacerbates demand (page 6). So encouraging loyalty within PI is crucial to having the best team.
The PI market for the traditional professions, for whom insurance is compulsory, is already well established but the emerging markets of IT, media and financial services are the way forward for further growth opportunities (page 19).
But Biba's Graeme Trudgill notes, following a visit from the FSA, that brokers are most in fear of PI insurance. So Biba has come to the rescue by launching an initiative that ensures every member has access to a specialist PI broker (page 21).
From a legal perspective, around 20 firms of solicitors have found themselves in the inauspicious position of having been consigned to the Assigned Risks Pool (ARP) - a definite badge of dishonour - following this year's renewals.
This is down to them having either a poor claims record, or a major claim still outstanding against them, making them unable to secure professional indemnity cover. It is a moot point whether the ARP is a much valued safety net or a mechanism which allows incompetent firms to stay in business at great cost to insurers (page 22).
And many of the industry's leading professionals highlight the need for more transparency of statistics in the PI market, asking what lessons can be learnt from past mistakes and questioning the strategy of poaching PI teams en masse (page 11).
