How We Placed a £30m Solicitors’ PI Programme

Solicitors’ PI is the most unforgiving professional indemnity market in the UK: cover is compulsory, the primary layer must be written on the SRA’s minimum terms and conditions — terms notably generous to claimants and notably strict on insurers — and every October a large part of the profession renews at once. Against that backdrop, we recently restructured a £30m professional indemnity stack for a law firm at this year’s renewal, producing a 25% premium saving — and we brought the underwriters to the firm’s own boardroom rather than the other way round. Those are the facts of the placement. What follows is the general anatomy of how work like this is done, because the method is what transfers from one firm to the next.

How a £30m solicitors’ tower is generally built

No single insurer writes £30m of solicitors’ exposure as one policy. A stack of this size is layered: a primary layer on the SRA minimum terms — the compulsory foundation, whose wording is prescribed and non-negotiable — and then excess layers above it, each written by a different insurer or group of insurers, each attaching where the one below exhausts. The excess layers sit outside the minimum terms regime, which means their wordings are negotiable in a way the primary’s is not: how closely they follow the primary, how they treat defence costs, what happens at the boundaries between layers. The design questions are where the primary should stop, how thick each excess layer should be, and which insurers should hold which positions — questions of engineering as much as purchasing, and the same questions any substantial layered programme must answer.

What restructuring a stack actually involves

A tower that has renewed with the same shape for years has usually drifted from the shape the market would build today. Restructuring means taking the whole stack back to first principles: whether the attachment points still make sense against the firm’s size and claims record, whether each layer’s price is proportionate to where it sits, whether the panel of insurers is the strongest available for each position, and whether the layers’ wordings actually align — because an excess layer that follows the primary imperfectly is a gap wearing a policy’s clothing. The output is often a differently shaped tower: layers consolidated or split, attachment points moved, some incumbent insurers retained in new positions, others replaced. Savings, where they come, come from this re-engineering and from genuine competitive tension for each slice — not from asking the same structure to cost less.

The precondition for all of it is time and information: a full claims history properly presented, a clear account of the firm’s work and risk management, and a renewal timetable that starts months before the deadline. A restructure cannot be improvised in the last fortnight of a renewal season, least of all in solicitors’ PI, where underwriter capacity for meetings evaporates as the common renewal date approaches.

Why we brought the underwriters to the firm’s boardroom

The conventional choreography of a large PI renewal has the client travel to the market: the firm’s partners present themselves at underwriters’ offices and make their case. Reversing that — bringing the underwriters to the firm’s own boardroom — is partly practical and wholly deliberate. Practically, underwriters who visit see the firm as it is: the offices, the people beyond the managing partner, the way the place actually runs — evidence no submission document fully carries. Deliberately, it reframes the meeting. In their office, the underwriter is assessing an applicant; in yours, they are a supplier being evaluated by a client with options. Nothing about the underwriting information changes, but the dynamic in which it is discussed does — and pricing is a negotiation conducted inside that dynamic. It also signals, without anyone saying so, that the broker has enough conviction in the risk to stake the relationship on close inspection. Underwriters read that signal accurately: nobody invites scrutiny of a risk they are trying to dress up.

What a firm should take from this

Not the numbers — every firm’s facts are different, and a result from one placement is a fact about that placement, not a promise about yours. What transfers is the method: treat the tower as a structure to be re-engineered rather than a renewal to be endured; insist that every layer justify its price and its wording; give the process enough runway that the market can be genuinely worked; and control the room in which the firm is presented. Solicitors’ PI rewards preparation more than almost any class, because the compulsory primary terms concentrate all the negotiable value in exactly the places — structure, excess wordings, panel selection, presentation — that preparation reaches.

Frequently asked questions

Can any law firm expect a 25% saving from restructuring?

No — and a broker who promises one before seeing your programme is telling you about their marketing, not your risk. Savings of that order come from specific conditions: a structure that had drifted, layers priced above their current market level, or presentation that undersold the firm. The honest sequence is analysis first, expectation after. What every firm can expect from a restructure is a programme whose shape and price have been tested rather than rolled forward.

Why does the primary layer have to be on SRA minimum terms?

Because the SRA requires it as a condition of practice: every participating insurer writing the compulsory primary layer for a law firm in England and Wales must use the prescribed minimum terms and conditions. That is what makes solicitors’ PI distinctive — the primary wording is fixed, so competition and negotiation concentrate on price, on the excess layers above, and on the quality of the insurers themselves.

Do underwriters really agree to visit a client firm?

For a substantial programme, presented by a broker they trust, generally yes — underwriters commit capital for years at a time and most welcome the chance to see a significant risk first-hand. The request itself does useful work: it tells the market the firm takes its own renewal seriously, and an underwriter’s willingness to engage is early evidence of their appetite.

Details anonymised to protect client confidentiality; outcomes vary with the risk.

Apex Insurance Brokers Limited is authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority (FRN 724952). Every risk is different: nothing on this page is advice on your own programme, and outcomes depend on your firm’s circumstances and the market at the time.