Shore Valley Oil: Live Errors and Omissions Training

JLT Risk Solutions a leading London based insurance broker commenced the design of an innovative Legal and Compliance training programme... After 18 months of research and preparation nearly 700 people participated in a preliminary half day Errors and Omissions Awareness module, the first part of a major two stage training programme...

Errors and Omissions“ E and O” or brokers’ professional indemnity  -is one of the  biggest business risks any broker faces, with a direct cost to the bottom line of buying cover, the potential risk of expensive claims awards and the lost management time and focus in investigating problems. There was therefore a real business driver: to reduce the risk, to prevent lack of knowledge causing a problem and to allow timely recognition to allow a problem to be solved before it reached the litigation stage. Uppermost throughout was the concern that there will always be client who is suffering. 

But the first objective was to raise awareness, to get people to take this risk seriously and remove the “it will never happen to me” mindset. The Awareness module had to have immediate impact, to get people to sit up and take note……..which is where AIM Associates entered the scene. A chance meeting at a conference led to real time drama as an obvious alternative to traditional and stale video scenarios. A partnership with Ed Harbour and Jill Connick produced the story of Shore Valley Oil: a script that saw a potential E and O claim being painfully uncovered, actors who studied brokers in their natural habit and played them for real and a storyline that left the audience thinking: Will it? Won’t it? And in the exercise that followed they had to explain why. Heightened audience awareness was immediate - the expected 10 or so exposures that the training designers had embedded into the script blossomed into enough to fill two flip charts.

Without doubt this – and the training that was to follow on a now-fertile seedbed - was a success and the message went in. Although it is unrealistic to directly correlate a decline in litigation and improved risk management to one intervention, the advice and help of the Compliance Dept are now sought much earlier in the process thus preventing some potential risks that might have otherwise arisen due to lack of knowledge and short cuts. The use of drama spread to a sister company and though the plot was different the message was the same. More importantly it continues, and E and O training has become a regular and unchallenged feature of business life.