Battles worth losing

While solicitors are usually recognised for the cases they win, in the insurance world, providers are more often judged on their losses. A household insurer may renew policies on thousands of homes, year-in-year-out, but it’s only when one suffers a major loss, like a fire, that the value of a policy is truly tested.

Our successes in the courtroom are undeniably crucial in enabling personal injury victims to secure compensation, but the cases that insurance providers lose can often say more about a business and its approach to claims.

One landmark clinical negligence case exemplifies ARAG’s enduring commitment to providing access to justice, backing the judgment of our solicitor partners and confident approach to risk, perhaps more than any of those that have been won.

While the origins of such a complex case inevitably date back years, it took a Supreme Court judgment to settle the difficult and finely balanced legal issues around pre-existing genetic conditions, establishing important case-law in the process.

It is not unreasonable to suggest that many of ARAG’s competitors would have declined to insure such a difficult claim from the outset. Very few, if any would have extended cover further once the original limit of indemnity had been reached.

The costs of such a long-running and complex case that gets all the way to the Supreme Court are inevitably huge. The six-figure loss to our clinical negligence book may seem large, but it was cause for neither disappointment nor concern. We see it as an indication that we haven’t set the bar too high.

Certainly, there is a more profitable path that many insurers follow, on which short-term rewards can be accumulated with much less risk. But such a strategy pays only lip service to the notion of enabling access to justice.

In this respect, ARAG’s strategy of modest but stable growth and its founding principle of extending access to justice as widely as possible, go hand-in-hand. Certainly, it is our extensive underwriting experience that enables us to approach the market with confidence and accept cases that others may have already turned away.

But it is our commitment to delivering the widest possible access to justice that drives us to insure cases, like this one, that other providers would not.

Market leadership is usually assessed in numerical terms, and ARAG has certainly built an impressive book of ATE business to rival any other in the sector. But true market leaders do more than simply rack up sales and profit, which is why ARAG is sometimes as proud of the cases we support that are lost, as the many that are won.

Disclaimer - all information in this article was correct at time of publishing.