Law firm insurance that protects the practice — nationwide.

Lawyers professional liability (LPL) — also called legal malpractice insurance — covers claims that your legal services caused a client financial harm. That includes missed deadlines and blown statutes of limitation, conflicts of interest, errors in drafting or advice, and similar professional mistakes, along with the cost of defending those claims. It does not cover the firm’s other exposures — employee injuries, data breaches, employment claims, or property damage — which is why most firms pair LPL with workers’ compensation, cyber, EPLI, and a business owner’s policy. LPL is the policy your clients and, in some states, your bar expect you to carry.

Almost all lawyers professional liability is written on a claims-made basis, which means the policy that responds is the one in force when the claim is made against you — not the one in force when you did the work. Two features control whether an old matter is covered: your retroactive date (the earliest date of work the policy will cover) and whether the policy includes prior-acts coverage. If you switch carriers and the new policy doesn’t pick up your prior acts, or sets a recent retroactive date, work you did in earlier years can fall through the gap. This is the single most important thing to get right when you change malpractice carriers, and it’s why we read the retroactive-date and prior-acts language before you bind.

Because legal malpractice is claims-made, coverage normally ends when the policy ends — but claims can surface years after the work. An extended reporting period (ERP), commonly called “tail” coverage, lets you report claims for work done during the policy period even after the policy itself is gone. You typically need tail when you retire, close or sell the firm, switch to a carrier that won’t cover your prior acts, or when a departing attorney needs to be protected for past work. Tail is usually priced as a percentage of your expiring premium and can be bought for a set number of years or, in some cases, unlimited. Deciding whether the firm or the departing lawyer buys it is a question worth handling before the transition, not after.

It depends on your state, and the rules vary more than in almost any other profession. Oregon is the only state that requires lawyers in private practice to carry malpractice coverage, through the Oregon State Bar Professional Liability Fund. A handful of states, including California, require you to disclose to clients in writing if you do not have insurance — see California Rule of Professional Conduct 1.4.2. Many other states ask your insurance status on your annual bar registration and make it public, while states such as Texas have declined to require either coverage or disclosure. The American Bar Association tracks how these rules differ state to state. We confirm what applies to your firm and structure coverage to match.

Smaller firms are often the most exposed, not the least. A single missed deadline or conflict can produce a claim larger than a small firm’s annual revenue, and even a meritless claim costs real money to defend — defense costs that, on most LPL policies, erode your limit. Many clients, lenders, and co-counsel won’t engage an uninsured firm, and in some states practicing without coverage triggers a disclosure obligation that can cost you the engagement or the fee. Because a clean firm with a stable practice is inexpensive to insure relative to the downside, going bare is rarely the saving it appears to be.

Law firms are unusually attractive cyber targets: they hold concentrated, confidential client data and routinely move large sums in real estate, settlement, and escrow matters. The dominant law-firm loss is not a dramatic hack but wire fraud — a criminal impersonates a client, opposing counsel, or a partner by email and redirects funds, a “social engineering” or business-email-compromise scheme that standard crime policies frequently exclude and that LPL does not cover. Cyber insurance covers breach response and notification, client-data liability, ransomware, and — with the right endorsement — social-engineering theft. Given a firm’s duty to safeguard client information and funds, cyber has moved from optional to foundational.

Yes. Law Firm Insurance Pros is the national law-firm practice of Thrive Risk Management Insurance Solutions, a licensed insurance brokerage (CA License #6012320). We place lawyers professional liability and the rest of a firm’s program nationally through our appointed carrier and wholesale partners, and we structure coverage to fit your state bar’s disclosure and financial-responsibility rules wherever you practice. Start with your state page or request a quote and we’ll confirm what applies to your firm before you spend time on paperwork.