Property and Casualty Insurance Editing and Proofreading Services

A warehouse insured for £2 million burns down and the claim is settled at £780,000 on a £1.1 million loss. The insured had a partial fire, not a total one, and a sum insured that was 71 per cent of the rebuild cost. The policy did exactly what it says. The insured had no idea what average was, and the schedule that told them was a number in a box.

We edit what property and casualty insurers, brokers and adjusters produce — policy schedules and their explanatory notes, sum insured and valuation guidance, underinsurance and average explanations, business interruption indemnity period material, renewal notices and reinstatement clauses, claims correspondence where average is applied, and the surveys and recommendations that precede a placement. Our editors work on the number a client picks without understanding it.

The explanation of underinsurance and the average clause is the most valuable page a property insurer can write, and its failure is a schedule that states a sum insured without stating what happens if it is wrong. Almost nobody outside the industry knows that a partial loss on an underinsured property is reduced proportionally. We work through these so the mechanism is demonstrated with arithmetic on a partial loss rather than described, since the total loss case is intuitive and the partial loss case is the one that surprises people; so the worked example uses the client's own figures, because a generic illustration is read past and their own numbers are not; so what the sum insured should represent is stated — the cost to rebuild today, including demolition, professional fees, and compliance with current regulations — given that most underinsurance comes from insuring the market value or a figure set years ago; so index linking is explained with what it does not keep pace with; so the client is told plainly how to obtain a proper valuation and roughly what it costs, as the recommendation is worthless without the route; so business interruption is treated separately with the indemnity period, since a client who has picked twelve months and needs eighteen has made the same mistake in a different place; so the renewal notice asks a direct question about changes rather than inviting a review; and so the consequence is stated in the client's own money. Documents written this way prevent the claim nobody recovers from.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including schedules, valuations, claims files and client correspondence. We are editors rather than surveyors, valuers or advisers, and we give no advice on cover or valuation and offer no view on any claim. What we can do is show the client what the number means.