Life Insurance Editing and Proofreading Services

A man dies and the policy pays £400,000 to his ex-wife. He remarried in 2016, had two children, and never changed the form he completed in 2003. The insurer has no discretion and the family has no claim. Nothing went wrong with the policy; the only thing that failed was a document nobody was ever prompted to look at again.

We edit what life insurers and their intermediaries produce — beneficiary designation forms and their guidance, policy summaries and annual statements, trust and assignment documentation in plain language, claim and bereavement communications, underwriting decision and rating letters, lapse and reinstatement notices, and the material explaining what a policy will and will not do. Our editors work on documents read once and relied on for decades.

The beneficiary designation and the guidance around it is the part of a life policy most likely to fail, and its failure is a form treated as an administrative field. The policy performs perfectly and pays the wrong person. We work through these so the consequence of the designation is stated on the form itself — that this determines who receives the money regardless of any will, divorce or later marriage — since the commonest and most damaging assumption is that a will overrides it; so the form asks whether circumstances have changed and lists the events that should prompt a review, because a prompt at the point of completion is worth more than any leaflet; so the difference between naming an individual, naming a class, and writing the policy in trust is explained in terms of who receives what and when rather than in terms of the mechanism; so the effect of naming a minor is stated plainly, given that families routinely name young children and create a problem nobody intended; so percentages are used rather than amounts, since a fixed sum among several beneficiaries produces an unintended result when the sum assured changes; so what happens if a beneficiary dies first is addressed on the form; so the annual statement repeats the current designation in full, as this is the only realistic prompt to review it; and so the bereavement communications tell a family what to do in the order they will need to do it. Documents written this way pay the right person.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including policy documents, beneficiary information and claims correspondence. We are editors rather than advisers, lawyers or tax specialists, and we give no advice on cover, estates or tax and offer no view on any policy or claim. What we can do is make the consequence of the form visible on the form.