Historically, you’ve sold Legal Expenses to your clients, now how do you introduce a new style of insurance that seems the same but with added value?
To aid the conversation our brokers have with their clients about Rural Protect, we’ve put together some pointers and compelling reasons as to why a Management Liability Policy is a must-have.
Why Rural Protect?
Rural Protect is a relatively new product that covers more than just Legal Expenses. It really is highly recommended for agricultural businesses, as it covers issues such as:
- CAP Schemes – where issues arise with the level of payment
- Rent Arbitration – when an issue arises with a tenant
- Fraud – for accidental payments sent to a fraudster’s account
- Tax – including all types of HMRC investigations
- Family Legal Expenses – covering the households of each insured business
director or owner - Pursuit – pursuing a third party to recover your money or put things right
- Brexit – if regulations change and you fail to observe them
Why insure legal and regulatory risks?
Once your business’s property, its contents, and the liabilities for employees and the public are covered, it’s important to ensure you are protected in the event of any mismanagement in the running of your business.
You wouldn’t think twice about insuring tangible things because you don’t want to be affected by their loss, but it’s the intangible things, such as legal matters, that can have far more life-changing consequences if not handled correctly or prevented in the first place. This is why you need to ensure that you have the best assistance and protection in place to cover you in these situations.
Reasons to consider Rural Protect
In-depth legal assistance – Rural Protect gives you access to rradar, a specialist litigation and commercial law firm that uses legal expertise and digital tools to educate, manage and advise on ways farmers can reduce their legal risks.
Prospect of Success – Legal Expenses cover requires a good prospect of success, which in most cases is 51% or more, and many policies require the prospect of success to be maintained throughout the claim too. If this threshold isn’t met or maintained, your insurer will not assist you – this is the last thing you need when things have gone wrong and you need legal assistance. Rural Protect doesn’t have such a condition so there’s no doubt over whether you’ll get the legal and insurance protection you need in the event of a valid claim.
No Warranty Clauses – Many Legal Expenses insurances require you to follow their advice for you to use their cover. If you were to deviate from this advice, technically, you would not be covered. Rural Protect doesn’t stipulate that you must follow rradar’s advice and flips this condition by reducing any excesses to reflect when you have followed their advice.
Legal Advice Privilege – With Legal Expenses Insurance, when you call for legal assistance, anything that is said to the operator can be used in court. With Rural Protect, you have direct access to rradar’s legal advisors, whose conversations are wrapped in legal privilege – so they stay confidential and cannot be used in court. There is even a crisis line that can be called any time, 24/7, should you need representation if the police or a regulator turns up unannounced.
Risk Management – Prevention is better than cure, and rradar’s digital tools can help with prevention! With Rural Protect you have access to rradarstation – the preventative advisory service with online resource portal and phone and email advice line, rradarreport – the digital incident reporting platform to document, manage and analyse business risks, and rradargrace – the intelligent legal assistant for businesses, available online or as an app.
Assisting Existing Covers – Rural Protect works with existing covers to ensure full protection. For example, the HSE’s £163 Fee for intervention (FFI) is not covered by EL or PL. Thankfully, Rural Protect covers these costs as they can quickly escalate and need paying even if you are not at fault.
Request our Let’s talk Management Liability flyer
We’ve turned the information above into a handy prompt for our brokers to refer back to and take with them on client visits – take a look at it here. Our flyer will help remind you of the USPs that make Rural Protect such a highly recommended product for agricultural businesses.
To request a PDF version of the flyer to print or keep on your devices, please email us at
enquiries@hbunderwriting.co.uk or call us on 01653 609090.
For more helpful resources to back up your Rural Protect discussion, visit our Rural Protect page here.
