In addition to professional liability insurance, it is important to make sure that the firm's assets are insured. Buildings, computers, law libraries, furniture, artwork, accounts receivables, valuable papers and records, and even intangibles like loss of earnings caused by catastrophic events (fire or tornado), are critical items to have properly covered. An insured's loss to any of these items would cause economic struggles for the firm.

   OAMIC, in collaboration with The Hartford, now offers a package policy providing various property and general liability coverages, which are specifically designed for law firms. Some of these coverages are unique with regard to a law firm's exposure, e.g. personal property of others including items of evidence and the law library.

   An endorsement within the policy provides several incidental coverages (without additional charge). These are important to a professional office and include items like employee dishonest, forgery and alteration, extra expense due to interruption of utility services, personal property off premise, personal effects of employees on premise and lap top computers.

   One of the difficulties in properly covering the various property loss exposures is placing exact insured values on some of the items such as accounts receivables, valuable papers and records, computers and media, and personal property of others. The insured value of these items typically changes from time to time and certain losses may not affect each of these items. This problem has been solved by placing these items under a blanket limit of $150,000. Additional advantages for this blanket limit are:
 

1. Full blanket amount available if a loss occurs to only one of these items, e.g. theft of computer equipment.
    
2. The extension of the blanket limit to these items may mean less values to insure under "personal property" (contents like furniture and equipment), which would result in significant premium savings.

Back to News Index