Excess professional liability is an additional policy that is over and above your firm’s practice policy.
Our agency is seeing more and more requests for higher limits on professional liability policies. In some cases, the insurance company that provides your firm’s practice policy may not be able to meet the limit requirements that your firm’s client has requested. In that case, there are some excess professional liability policies in the marketplace.
How the policy works is similar to an umbrella policy but is only for professional liability insurance. For example, if your firm has a practice policy of $5,000,000 per claim and $5,000,000 aggregate and your client is requesting $10,000,000 per claim and $10,000,000 aggregate, this is when an excess professional liability insurance company can help.
Typically, the insurance company providing the excess professional liability policy will want to review your firm’s professional liability application, your firms current professional liability policy and loss runs. Some insurance companies may request an additional application and/or a copy of the contract(s) requesting the higher limits. From this additional information provided the insurance company will determine if they can provide a quote for the excess professional liability limit requested.
In most cases, the quote will not include a deductible since your firm will be paying a deductible on the practice policy. The excess professional liability policy will only pay out once your practice policy limits have been exhausted.
The excess professional liability policy is different from an umbrella policy in that it is only for professional liability. An umbrella policy will be over and above the general liability, automobile liability and the workers compensation policies.