Memo 45 – Insurance and Admission of Errors

We have professional indemnity insurance at Tek1.

As part of our policy – on anything which may give rise to a claim you are not allowed to admit liability or mistakes. In fact, people will try to get you to admit – to make you the person at fault – when it could be the system at fault, or themselves:

1. Suppose there are 120 emails exchanges and conversations with engineers + architects over 3 weeks. Phone conversations, markups, various revisions.
2. You miss one email.
3. Then an engineer will say: “Aha! It’s your fault” when there is an error.
4. Is it really your fault? Or is it the fault of the engineer / architect / builder to have designs so bad, that they necessitate umpteen emails going back and forth: and revisions on top of revisions. Perhaps it may be your fault, but it becomes an argument.

If you admit to mistakes then you lose insurance coverage. You will be violating your own insurance contract.

Let the insurers debate the matter.

Insurance: Court Cases

Leave it to the insurers to decide or argue this. They are looking for an “easy admission”. Judges are not welders or fabricators. They don’t know how builders can send you a million emails / revisions due to their bad designs – that does not matter if you “admit” something. You’re probably wrong anyways.

Let the insurance company handle it.

• It’s very easy to miss mails and emails.
• Fighting things out in court is super expensive.
• If you miss an email / letter – then in a few months, the courts could “garnish” your bank account. This means they take money out of your account while you are asleep at night. Almost like a theif.