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Posted on: July 22, 2021 by Huntersure
When a building’s foundation becomes unstable, can engineers be held liable? If you’re an insurance agent who specializes in engineer professional liability, you probably get this question a lot, especially from clients you’ve worked with for years. After all, they are more likely to face lawsuits involving malpractice and negligence as their client network increases. Before your next meeting, brush up on these reasons why your clients could be sued.
If your clients’ customers file complaints about their buildings and your clients ignore these reports, they will probably be sued for negligence. They may file this kind of lawsuit if your clients do not uphold their industry’s standard of care, which means that they avoid damaging the property they’re working on and causing injuries. Standard of care also requires your clients to be transparent about their oversight procedures and to keep accurate records of their meetings and progress.
Your clients may also face negligence accusations if they do not meet their customers’ requirements. If they use more materials than customers have agreed to pay for or if they violate their contracts, their customers probably have cause to sue.
To protect your clients’ reputations and budgets, encourage them to maintain open communication throughout the entire process. They should explain exactly what they are capable of and notify their clients whenever they need to deviate from the agreed-upon plan.
Common complaints in engineer professional liability claims involve your clients’ mistakes causing financial problems for their clients. Sometimes, your clients make errors when they do not create good plans. They may fail to calculate how much weight a header needs to support, or they may forget to add extra rafters to boost a balcony. If your clients’ customers lose funds because of these mistakes, they will probably sue your clients.
Omissions are another kind of mistake that occurs when your clients do not take actions that they should have. Failing to conduct the right inspections, forgetting about a client’s instructions, and withholding information from a client are all omissions.
To protect your clients from these claims, offer them errors and omissions insurance, sometimes called professional liability coverage. If your clients get sued because of a mistake, E&O insurance assists with their court fees and settlements.
As your clients get more experience and command bigger budgets, they take on more clients and independent contractors. When they involve lots of people in their projects, there’s an increased chance that they’ll make a costly mistake or deliver poor work. To avoid engineer professional liability claims, encourage your clients to make sure that they can handle a client’s requests before signing a contract. They must also review each contractor’s credentials before allowing them to help.
Huntersure LLC is a full-service Managing General Agency that has provided insurance program administration for professional liability products to our partners across the United States since 2007. We specialize in providing insurance solutions for businesses of all sizes. Our program features can cover small firms (grossing $2.5 million annually) to large corporations (grossing $25 million annually or more). We make doing business with us easy with our breadth and depth of knowledge of E&O insurance, our proprietary underwriting system that allows for responsive quoting, binding and policy issuance and tailored products to meet the needs of your insureds. Give us a call at (855) 585-6255 to learn more.
Posted in: Architects/ Engineers