EBM Insights podcast series is a deep dive into current issues surrounding insurance and risk management in today’s ever-changing world.
Introduction:
In this podcast we talk with Mark Waters, Senior Underwriter for Legal Solutions at Score Syndicate 2025 about some of the day-to-day risks experienced by businesses and the solutions available to them.
A transcript of this podcast is below. The complete EBM Insights podcast series is available here.
Disclaimer
In this podcast, we have provided general advice only and not personal advice. In giving this advice, we have not considered your personal circumstances.
00:00:17 Speaker 1 – Sandy Cattley (Senior Marketing Specialist, EBM Insurance & Risk)
Thank you everyone for joining in this podcast. I’m Sandy Cattley from EBM Insurance & Risk.
Our EBM Insights Podcast series takes a look at various topics in the insurance and risk space.
Today I’m joined by Mark Waters, Senior Underwriter for Legal Solutions from Score Syndicate 2015. We are very fortunate to have him join us today during his time in Australia.
Welcome Mark and thanks for joining me.
00:00:42 Speaker 2 – Mark Waters (Senior Underwriter for Legal Solutions, Score Syndicate 2015)
Thanks Sandy, thanks for having me on.
00:00:44 Speaker 1 – Sandy Cattley
I thought we’d start with an explanation of legal expenses and what it covers.
00:00:51 Speaker 2 – Mark Waters
Sure, always a good place to start. So, in terms of legal expense insurance, it’s been around in the Australian market now probably for the last 10 years, but probably really has only picked up over the last sort of four or five years. Everything we’re talking about when it comes to legal expenses insurance is really providing coverage for legal costs and the associated disbursements and other costs incurred by lawyers when your clients are in situations where they’re potentially having to fight claims which aren’t necessarily liability related.
So, everything we’re talking about today is very much about the sort of day-to-day business risks of what businesses face.
As I’m sure you know, a lot of your listeners are aware of, you know, an awful lot of what liability insurance ends up doing is paying for lawyers. But clearly that’s only specifically in terms of liability claims. Everything that I get involved in on the flip side of that and from our legal expenses covers that we provide is more about the sort of day-to-day business legal risks. So, we could be talking about issues with landlords, problems with employees, you know Fair Work claim defence, that sort of thing.
One of the things which is really the crux of the market in Australia is the commercial contract cover and that’s really where it’s all at from a market perspective in Australia.
And everything we’re talking about in that world is disputes around the customer and supplier contracts that pretty much every business client that any of us ever deal with faces.
Now, one of the unique elements of a legal expenses policy and is most unusual for what your listeners are probably used to, is that unlike a liability policy, a legal expenses cover doesn’t just sit back and wait for something to happen. You can use it as both effectively like a sword and a shield because it provides both pursuit and defence in certain areas of the policy. Most commonly in that contractual disputes area where, as you might imagine, quite often the most common claim is ‘somebody owes us money. What do I do about it? And how do I get it back?’
And really the premise of everything we do in the legal expenses world is about giving clients the ability to do something that otherwise they might not or certainly they would at least have to fund themselves. So often there’s a there’s a misnomer whereby people think well, ‘it’s not liability related but it doesn’t matter, we’ll just go after them.’ Well, actually, it’s that going after bit that we fund and pay for as part of the legal expenses insurance.
00:03:26 Speaker 1 – Sandy Cattley
Thanks, Mark. So how can a client benefit from a legal expenses policy?
00:03:31 Speaker 2 – Mark Waters
Again, another great question, and as we just mentioned everything about what we do in the legal expenses world is about giving clients the ability to pursue and defend their legal rights as and when they need to.
Clearly there is a cost benefit from doing that because obviously we’re preventing them from having costs of actually having to fund lawyers themselves. But even outside of that, there are there are two elements in particular I think with the coverage that that comes with it. Firstly, obviously there is the insurance coverage which obviously covers the costs of lawyers and the disbursements that they incur and indeed any shortfalls in any cost recovery. So that might happen even in a successful claim. It’s very rare in Australia actually to have 100% indemnity recovery from say a court case for example, and there will always be a shortfall.
The other element to the policies, which is a major, major selling point that we provide in Australia is it’s not just about the insurance piece. So, alongside the policies we actually provide access to unlimited legal advice through a law firm. So, actually clients get the benefit of having ongoing advisory services and that really genuinely is unlimited. There’s no limit to the number of calls or the lengths of calls that they can make and that provides both telephone and email advisory services.
It’s also not linked to the policy coverage, so they might be ringing about something and a simple example could be for say, let’s say one of their female employees, you know, tells them that they are pregnant, so they might ring up for some advice about, you know, do need to change her duties or do anything different, how much maternity leave are they required to provide and that sort of thing. It doesn’t have to be a dispute scenario that’s covered by the policy. It is a full spectrum as long as it’s business advice and we’re not giving people advice around their family issues or divorce, that sort of thing. But they get ongoing business advice.
The most important thing actually about that service, aside from obviously the actual benefit of the advice is it turns the insurance product from being something for the never-never hopefully that they’ll never have to use, but if they do get into a dispute, they get the benefit, but it makes it much more of a service proposition, and if clients can start using that service that does two things.
It doesn’t necessarily keep them out of the state courts. It’s very, very hard to work in that manner and it would be too far-fetched for me to suggest that having legal advice will stop you getting into a dispute. But what it does do is make sure that when you do get into a dispute, if you’ve gone from a position of strength whereby you’ve been advised correctly along the way, actually your claims are probably more likely to be winnable and defendable, and therefore you can get more benefit out of the coverage.
00:06:21 Speaker 1 – Sandy Cattley
Thank you. That was really interesting. So, we’re also seeing that the insurance market is softening. Does this have any impact on legal expenses cover?
00:06:33 Speaker 2 – Mark Waters
Not necessarily. Specifically, you know to us as legal expenses providers. One of the luxuries we have with these types of products is that it doesn’t necessarily follow the hardening and the softening of the markets in the traditional sense.
00:06:53 Speaker 1 – Sandy Cattley
I thought we’d now just touch on cyber. We’ve mentioned in our podcasts previously that a cybercrime is reported in Australia every six minutes. So, are there any scenarios where a legal expenses policy will assist a business if they have experienced a cyber incident?
00:07:10 Speaker 2 – Mark Waters
The simple answer is yes, but also by the same token, the flip side of that is the policy clearly doesn’t want to tread on the toes of, you know, the cyber coverages and the cyber insurers. But there are elements to the coverage where we do have some beneficial areas. So, there are actually sort of multiple avenues within the cover. First and foremost, if we come back to that legal advice element, clearly there is the ability to access advice either both ahead of the incident happening and indeed you know, as a result of say a breach or something like that. You know people understand their obligations. The service can help them get their relevant sort of policies correct and that sort of thing.
We also do provide elements of what we call sort of data protection cover within our wordings, and that could be, it’s not again, it’s not designed to tread on the toes of the cyber coverages and effectively be a breach response service. But it provides coverage for defence of third party claims should one arise. i.e. a customer or data you know subject to actually bringing an action against somebody. It would respond to that. But for the legal expenses only, not for the liability element, and therefore is in that sense somewhat detrimental obviously to a full blown cyber coverage. But the other thing that cover will also do is respond to an action by a data protection regulator of some kind. i.e. putting up a defence possibly say to a final penalty or mitigating that final penalty from that data regulator, unlike how a cyber policy might do it. So, there is a sort of two pronged protection there really though from a legal expenses policy point of view the idea is to avoid the conflict with any sort of cyber coverage and very much see it as supplementary to the wider cyber cover.
00:09:12 Speaker 1 – Sandy Cattley
So, thank you Mark for joining me today. Have a great time in Australia.
If anyone has any questions, please reach out to EBM and you can contact us on ebm.com.au
Thanks again, Mark.
00:09:28 Speaker 2 – Mark Waters
Thanks very much for having me it’s been great.
00: 90:30 Speaker 1 – Sandy Cattley
Thank you.
[end]
