Proactively Removing Professional Indemnity Risk for Solicitors
As a Professional Indemnity Insurer of SRA regulated Solicitors practices we are acutely aware of the risks faced by the Industry that lead to claims. The problem is often that the Professionals in the industry don’t always fully appreciate the risks they face. This can be due to a lack of knowledge and insight of the claims being suffered, or the misguided perception “that type of claim couldn’t happen to me’.
Two years ago we launched our Partnership with Cyfor a leading firm specialising in IT security for law firms. It followed years of trying to understand if firms did actually take their IT security seriously. For years we would ask on Proposal forms do you have two factor authentication on all your cloud based software.... the answer was always “Yes” the reality however was often “No”. Cyfor changed that for us, by actually auditing our insured firms and advising them on how to better protect themselves and making sure when an Insured said “Yes” to us about IT security they actually meant it.
This hands-on proactive approach to mitigating that risk with physical intervention by specialists has been hugely successful; in short professional indemnity claims relating to Cyber security breaches since we started undertaking these audits of our insured firms have completely disappeared.
Our next challenge is trying to eradicate claims arising from Identity Fraud. The Court of appeal case of Dreamvar v Mishcon de Reya caused a major problem for Professional Indemnity Insurers, it simply lumped firms with good ID and AML processes together with bad ones, and for the last two years we’ve been working out how we solve that.
I am glad to announce today that we have partnered with Thirdfort a growing and leading supplier of AML and ID checking, which brings cutting edge technology to allow Law Firms to mitigate the risks of an identity fraud occurring. This new partnership is going to take time to show results, but our challenge (and it’s a big one) is that if we can get all Law Firms to use Thirdfort to undertake ID and AML checks we can eliminate claims arising from ID fraud.
Again I know we will face an uphill struggle many firms will tell me their AML and ID processes are top notch, and it would never happen to them. My response is your approach is not as good as Thirdfort’s, how could it be... Thirdfort have invested literally Millions of Pounds on being the best in just this space.
At Inperio we want to persuade you we’ve got this right which means that from today we will incentivise you for using Thirdfort when you combine it with your Professional Indemnity Insurance, and I hope two years from now we can claim to have the same success we had with Cyber Fraud and eliminate ID and AML fraud from our Insured Firms.
Speak to your broker today to understand how your firm could help eliminate ID and AML fraud with new Inperio and Thirdfort partnership.