A risk advisor for professional services firms

For a professional services firm, the loss that actually shows up is a client alleging that your advice, design, report, or deliverable cost them money. That is professional liability / errors & omissions territory, and the wording matters more than the limit on the declarations page. We look at the retroactive date and prior-acts coverage so work you did years ago is still picked up, whether defense costs erode the limit or sit outside it, how the policy defines a claim and a related-claims aggregation, and consent-to-settle / “hammer” provisions that can leave you on the hook if you and the carrier disagree on a settlement. For firms whose services do not fit a packaged accountant, architect, or engineer form, we place miscellaneous E&O wording matched to the scope you actually perform rather than a class label.

The second pressure point is client contracts. Master service agreements and engagement letters routinely dictate minimum E&O and cyber limits, required additional-insured status, primary and non-contributory wording, waivers of subrogation, and sometimes per-project or dedicated per-claim limits that a shared aggregate will not satisfy. We read those insurance clauses against the policies you carry before you sign, so the certificate your client’s procurement team demands can be issued from real coverage rather than promised and then negotiated under deadline. Where a single large engagement carries outsized exposure, we look at project-specific limits or a dedicated tower instead of stretching the firm’s general aggregate across every client at once.

The third exposure is the data and money moving through your systems. Client files, privileged records, and email-based payment instructions make these firms a target for breach and social-engineering wire fraud, and the general liability and E&O forms generally exclude that loss. We structure cyber around breach response, regulatory defense, funds-transfer and social-engineering fraud, and the business interruption that follows an outage, and we coordinate it with the E&O form so a single incident does not fall into the seam between two policies. Programs are built to reduce gaps and clarify exclusions; what ultimately responds depends on policy terms, limits, and carrier decisions.