Professional liability insurance

Professional liability insurance (RC Pro), also known as Errors and Omissions (E&O) in the Anglo-Saxon nomenclature, is an insurance contract covering the financial consequences of the civil liability a professional may incur toward clients or third parties in the course of their professional practice. It covers faults, errors, inaccuracies, omissions, negligence or breaches committed in the context of professional services and causing patrimonial or moral damage to the third party. It generally does not cover intentional faults, fraud or criminal liability. Regulated liberal professions (lawyers, doctors, accountants, architects) are legally required to take out professional liability cover. In the context of agentic AI and the Zero-Employee Firm, professional liability constitutes the first insurance reflex of the director-architect seeking to cover risk related to algorithmic agent decisions. This attempt runs into a structural incompatibility: classical professional liability is designed for human errors in the exercise of a defined professional activity, not for autonomous decisions by algorithms whose opacity prevents demonstrating that the fault results from a professional breach by the insured. Exclusions relating to digital tools provided by third parties further complicate the determination of the liability chain when an LLM has produced a damaging decision.

A strategy consultant using an LLM agent to draft an acquisition recommendation that proves erroneous is covered by professional liability for the analytical error: their professional responsibility is engaged. But if the model produced a factually false statement (hallucination) that was not verified, the insurer may invoke the exclusion relating to the use of uncontrolled tools or the failure to verify information provided to a third party.

RC Pro, Professional Liability, E&O, Errors and Omissions, assurance fautes professionnelles