You can promise more in a contract than any policy will ever pay for.
Professional liability answers negligence. A signature can turn that into a guarantee, and a guarantee is not negligence. Liability you took on by contract, beyond what the law would have put on you anyway, is usually excluded.
Send us the clause Read the short answer firstWere you negligent, or did you promise?
Ensure, guarantee, warrant.
Limit the indemnity to your own negligence.
Does my professional liability policy cover what I agreed to in the client’s contract?
Only the part of it the law would have made you responsible for anyway. Professional liability insurance responds to negligence, which means failing to meet the standard of care a reasonably careful professional in your field would have met. Most policies then exclude liability you assumed under a contract that goes beyond that standard. So a clause promising a result, rather than promising care, can create an obligation that is real, enforceable, and entirely uninsured.
Nobody signs these clauses on purpose. They arrive inside a long client agreement, often on the client’s standard form, and they read like ordinary commercial boilerplate. The gap does not appear at signing. It appears years later, when a claim is made under a promise the policy was never written to answer, and the professional is defending it personally.
Reviewing a contract is legal work and belongs with your lawyer. What a broker can do, quickly and at no cost, is read the insurance and indemnity clauses against your actual policy and tell you which parts your cover would answer and which parts it would not. Those are different questions and both need answering before you sign. Send the clause and the current policy together and you will get that in writing, with no sales call unless you ask for one.
None of them look dangerous on the page.
Guarantee and warranty language
Words like ensure, guarantee, warrant, and fit for purpose promise a result. Professional liability promises care, not results. A design or a report that met the professional standard and still did not deliver the promised outcome is a breach of the promise without any negligence, and that is the shape of claim the policy is least likely to answer.
The highest standard clause
Agreeing to the highest standard of care, or to the standard of the most experienced practitioner, raises the bar above the one your policy is written against. You can now fall short of what you promised while having done nothing a court would call negligent. The client has a claim and the insurer has a coverage question.
Duty to defend
Agreeing to defend the client, rather than to indemnify them for a loss, brings forward an obligation that starts the day an allegation is made rather than the day fault is established. Defence obligations are expensive, they run whether the allegation is sound or not, and they are commonly outside the indemnity a professional policy provides.
Uncapped and consequential loss
An indemnity with no cap, or one that reaches the client’s lost profits and economic loss, is an obligation with no ceiling sitting behind a policy that has one. Even where the type of loss is insurable, the size of the promise is not matched by the size of the limit, and the difference is the professional’s own money.
Three edits that keep the work and remove the uninsured half.
Tie the indemnity to negligence
The most common and most accepted change is to limit the indemnity to loss arising from your own negligent acts, errors or omissions. Clients agree to this far more often than professionals expect, because it is what a professional indemnity is normally understood to mean. It also brings the promise back inside what the policy answers.
Match the standard to the profession
The ordinary formulation is the standard of care of a reasonably prudent practitioner performing similar work in similar circumstances. It is not a weakening of the obligation. It is the obligation the law already imposes, written down, and it is the one your insurer priced.
Ask for the limits you actually hold
Contracts often name a required limit without anyone checking what you carry, and a certificate is then issued that quietly does not match. Either the limit is raised before signing or the clause is adjusted. Discovering the mismatch at the certificate stage delays the start of the work, which is the moment nobody has time for it.
The ones that come up with an unsigned contract on the desk.
Can the client be added as an additional insured on my professional policy?
Usually not. Additional insured status is a general liability idea and it does not translate well to professional liability, where the whole point is that the cover follows your own professional conduct. Clients ask for it out of habit. What normally satisfies them is a certificate confirming the cover and the limit, and sometimes a notice of cancellation provision.
Is a contractual liability exclusion in every policy?
Something of that shape appears in most professional liability wordings, but they are not identical and the carve-backs differ. Some give back liability you would have had at law in any event, which is the important carve-back. This is exactly why the answer has to come from your own wording rather than from a general rule.
The contract is take it or leave it. What then?
Then it becomes a commercial decision made with the number in front of you rather than one made by accident. Sometimes the exposure is small enough to accept. Sometimes it can be reduced by a cap, or by excluding consequential loss while leaving the rest. Knowing which part is uninsured before you sign is the whole objective.
Does this apply to subconsultants I hire?
It applies twice. You may be promising the client something on work your subconsultant performs, and your agreement with that subconsultant may not pass the same obligation down or require them to carry a matching limit. A gap between the two contracts is where the loss lands on you. Send both and they can be read together.
We have signed already. Is it too late?
No. It is worth knowing where you stand on live contracts, and it changes what you do at the next renewal and on the next agreement with the same client. Wordings, limits and extensions can all be looked at with the real exposure known rather than assumed.
Not the question you had? Send the clause and your current policy through the quote file and you will get a written answer, not a sales call.
Send us the clause before you sign it.
Your lawyer reads the contract. We read the insurance and indemnity wording against the policy you actually hold, and tell you in writing which half is covered.