Our Pre-Loss Wisdom results from our Risk Gap Analysis process.

The objectives are to:

• Help firms to establish a framework and metrics by which international best practice might be identified and monitored and against which a firm can compare itself; and
• Introduce firms to a process of more systematically identifying opportunities to strengthen current insurance programs and operations. The Insurance Gap Analysis complements the Legal Sector Gap Analysis.

Legal Industry Risk Management – Broader Risk Management Issues

A range of risk consulting services and solutions can be offered which can result in recommendations not only for improved insurance solutions but also strengthening of business and practice operations. Insurance itself is an important risk management strategy but risk management is also about being seen as a good risk because of the strength of the business and business operations.

There are many business and practice risks that need to be managed operationally quite apart from how the issues are dealt with in the insurance program.

The following broader risk management processes are relevant.

Strategic Risk Profiling

Organisations tend to concentrate on their major risk exposure; e.g., professional indemnity risk. Your may wish to consider the potential of being blindsided by the occurrence of a low probability, high consequence risk. For example a:

• Major employee fraud.
• Externally engineered Telephone fraud.
• Computer disaster and loss of data.
• Loss of a major asset to fire.
• High profile discrimination action.

Firms may benefit from conducting a risk profiling exercise to identify a full range of risks which may apply to the business.

Controls are documented and minimum standards for risk management are suggested. This approach is outlined in more detail in our SIRS RiskThinkers site; www.riskthinkers.com

The Legal RiskThinkers team can provide risk consulting services aimed at:

• Ensuring the insurance program continually adapts to meet your needs (i.e. that there are no unrecognised uninsured risks that might be insured against by improvements or tweaking of the insurance program); and
• Assessing the strengths and vulnerabilities of the firm’s operations as regards business and professional risks (i.e. identify and recommend risk management solutions that are not insurance based but will have the benefit of being and being seen to be a good risk).