Professional liability coverage is malpractice and errors-and-omissions insurance evaluated as part of a full risk picture (limits sized to current income, tail accounted for, structure coordinated against your umbrella and entity work). We evaluate it together, then quarterback placement through vetted carriers.
Professional liability insurance, including medical malpractice and errors-and-omissions coverage, pays for the legal defense, settlements, and judgments that arise when a client, patient, or counterparty alleges a professional failure. Most policies cover negligence, mistakes, oversights, and the kind of judgment calls that look obvious in a deposition and rarely look obvious in real time.
What policies do not cover: intentional wrongdoing, criminal acts, bodily injury (which sits with general liability), and most employment disputes. The bigger surprise is what sits in the gap above the policy. People assume the personal umbrella stacked on their home and auto coverage will catch a professional claim once the malpractice limit is exhausted. It generally won't, and they tend to learn that at the worst possible moment.
For physicians, dentists, attorneys, RIAs, board members, executives, and consultants, this coverage is non-optional. The decision is not whether to carry it; it's whether what's carried is sized and structured correctly for the income and exposure it's actually protecting.
Our work stops at the planning line: we read your liability exposure as one component of the coordinated risk picture inside our Risk Mitigation practice, then hand any placement to vetted brokers and carriers in the Virtual Family Office network. We have no policy to sell you, which is the point. If your current broker is doing the job well, they keep it; we just make sure what they place actually fits the rest of the plan.
The evaluation reads across five questions every time:
-Are limits sized to current income, net worth, and the realistic range of claims your specialty faces? A $1M / $3M policy that fit on the day you joined the practice may not fit five years later.
Do the professional policy and the personal umbrella meet cleanly, or is there daylight between them? A genuine asset-protection plan needs to know exactly where one layer's responsibility ends and the next begins, because a claim will find any inch of space between them.
Is tail coverage handled at every job change? Claims-made policies require purchasing a tail (extended reporting period) when you leave a position. Missing it leaves a window of exposure that may not surface for years.
Does the policy form match the work you actually do? Side gigs, expert-witness testimony, telemedicine across state lines, board seats on outside companies, and consulting work each create coverage questions a default policy may not answer.
Does the structure underneath the coverage hold? Entity structure, asset titling, and trust ownership determine what's actually exposed if a claim breaches the coverage limit. The policy is the first line; the asset protection planning work is the line behind it.
Where the answers are clean, we say so. Where they aren't, we flag the gap and quarterback the fix.
The malpractice policy is not the whole risk plan. It's one piece of a stack that has to coordinate.
For a clinician, that stack typically includes a properly sized professional liability policy, a personal umbrella that picks up where the professional policy stops, an entity structure that separates personal assets from practice exposure, disability coverage that protects the income engine, and life coverage sized to the household's actual obligations. The job is making sure they read each other.
Risk likes to find the seams. A claim that breaches the professional limit will land on the personal umbrella; if the umbrella excludes the act, it lands on personal assets; if those are titled inside the right entity structure, the exposure stops there. If they aren't, it doesn't. Each handoff is a planning decision, not an insurance decision.
For physicians, dentists, and other medical professionals, the parallel work for the practice itself sits on the business protection insurance page, and the broader VFO frame for clinicians lives on our Medical Professionals overview. Life coverage that funds estate liquidity, buy-sells, or wealth transfer is handled inside life insurance planning.
Your broker stays your broker if the relationship is working. Your attorney stays your attorney. We sit in the planning lane, evaluate exposure across the full picture, and bring in our vetted specialists only where the existing team doesn't have the tooling or specialty to handle a specific case.
What changes is less about any single policy and more about who is watching the whole picture over time. A broker sells coverage; an attorney drafts structure. Neither one owns the question of whether all of it still fits the career you actually have now. That ownership is the planning lane:
Coverage that fit at hire drifts as income, specialty, and side work change. A relationship that knows where your career is going catches the drift before a claim does.
The policy, the umbrella, and the entity structure stop being three separate vendors' problems and become one coordinated decision.
Tail purchases, new exposures from telemedicine or board seats, limit increases ahead of a practice change: the moves that only matter in hindsight get made on time.
Professional malpractice and errors-and-omissions insurance pays for legal defense costs, settlements, and judgments arising from claims of professional negligence, oversight, or judgment errors. Coverage varies by policy and specialty. What it generally does not cover: intentional wrongdoing, criminal acts, bodily injury, and employment disputes.
It depends on the profession, the specialty, the state, the claims history, and the carrier. Premiums for physicians vary widely by specialty, with high-acuity surgical specialties materially higher than primary care. The right answer is a model against your specific situation, not a dollar number on a generic page.
A $1M / $3M policy provides $1 million in coverage per individual claim and $3 million in aggregate annual coverage across all claims in the policy year. It's the most common limit structure for medical professionals, but "common" doesn't mean "right." High-income clinicians and those in higher-acuity specialties often need higher limits and a personal umbrella sized to coordinate.
The phrase usually refers to the major professional categories: medical malpractice, legal malpractice, accounting malpractice, and financial professional malpractice. Each has its own policy market, regulatory environment, and underwriting logic.
Most professional liability policies exclude intentional wrongdoing, criminal conduct, bodily injury (handled by general liability), property damage, and most employment-practices disputes. Personal umbrellas usually exclude the professional acts that the malpractice policy covers, so the two policies need to coordinate at the seam.
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Important disclosure: Kotini & Kotini coordinates risk-mitigation planning across professional liability, personal umbrella, life, and business protection coverages. Insurance placement is performed by licensed brokers and carriers in the Virtual Family Office network. K&K does not provide legal advice or fiduciary investment management directly, and no statement on this page should be construed as a recommendation of a specific policy or carrier. See our disclosures page for the full description of the coordination model.
