Anthony Sce III is the president and CEO at Executive Insurance & Financial Services. A premiere business insurance agency in Bohemia, New York, Sce’s company serves clients in all five boroughs of New York City, along with Nassau and Suffolk counties. In this article, he explains the basics of why it is more important for people to have insurance protection today than ever before.
Having the right insurance has become more important today than in the past because, unfortunately, our society has become more litigious as a whole. Examples of how litigious our society has become are really everywhere around us.
As one perfect example, I am an early bird who wakes up around 3:45 a.m. daily, and my TV is what wakes me up. Without fail, there is always a new attorney commercial advertising for an attorney who says he will take your case and sue someone else for just about anything. That is just one example of what a litigious society we live in, and that shows why it is so important that you get the proper insurances to protect your assets — because there is already an attorney out there trying to find clients who could potentially sue you for something.
Because of this, there are now more types of insurances to choose from than there ever have been in the past, as well. These days, you can get an insurance policy to protect you from so many things — much more than just automobile or homeowner’s insurance. Meanwhile, these attorneys keep finding new things to sue for, which keeps driving the need for more insurances and ways to protect the assets that you have.
Probably one of the newest types of insurance coverage out there is called E.P.L.I. insurance. Now, E.P.L.I. insurance, which stands for Employers Protective Liability Insurance, is actually a type of insurance that is meant to protect the employer in case he or she is sued by an employee or a former employee for wrongful termination and/or sexual harassment at any point. It is just one of the many new types of insurances that have been created to help people protect their assets in the event of a lawsuit.
This is a big business, and attorneys are coming out there all the time specializing in just this type of thing. They are trying to make money by suing people, and they are advertising on late night television to find more and more clients. And as far as the insurance goes, it is a relatively inexpensive way to protect yourself in case a former employee ever comes back and claims that he or she was dismissed in a way that was illlegal.
Of course, the specific price of an insurance policy like E.P.L.I. would depend on various factors, such as the number of employees who currently work at your business, and whether or not you have a claim already filed against you or your company.
The sidebar for this coverage is that in many instances, nothing ever even gets paid out as a result of these lawsuits. However, the attorney or defense costs alone can be well over $50,000 to defend yourself from these allegations. So when looking for an E.P.L.I. policy to protect yourself, you will want to find one that covers the attorney defense costs outside the limits of the policy, in case the worst should happen and you are sued and required to pay for an attorney out of pocket. That’s the point of insurance — to be protected.
