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The escalating cost of professional indemnity insurance may mean the total premium pot for solicitors approaches £300m this year, the first time it will have exceeded the last contribution to the Solicitors Indemnity Fund, a leading broker has predicted. The news comes as a report on PII commissioned by the Solicitors Regulation Authority recommended a range of reforms to the scheme, including removing the minimum terms and conditions in relation to commercial clients, ending the single renewal date and no longer requiring insurers to cover firms that have not paid their premiums.

The anticipated deluge of law firms entering the assigned risks pool has not materialised, but the numbers are still large, Legal Futures can reveal. But they will fall over the next month as firms can backdate their insurance if they find it by the end of October.

Almost half of the law firms in the assigned risks pool (ARP) still owe premiums running to millions of pounds, although the ARP enforcement strategy has encouraged some to pay up, it has emerged.

When the profession ditched the Solicitors Indemnity Fund (SIF), a compelling reason for the move was that many good firms were paying for the failures of the few. Now, a decade later, solicitors are back in exactly the same position. Only, the ‘few’ could become substantially more over the next few months.

The Solicitors Regulation Authority has learnt the hard way about how sensitive issues around black and minority ethnic (BME) lawyers can be. Readers may recall the almighty row that erupted in 2008 over the disproportionate number of BME solicitors who face regulatory sanctions. So one imagines SRA staff and the new board have trodden with huge care in the face of opposition from the Black Solicitors Network to the proposed reforms of the assigned risks pool, which the SRA’s own equality impact assessment indicates will adversely impact BME firms.