Legal assistance home insurance means you can cover your buildings and contents as well as getting support for various legal expenses.
This is usually an add-on that can help with various legal issues such as unfair dismissal at work, tax issues and personal injury.
However, at Emerald Life we provide legal assistance home insurance for free as part of our buildings and contents insurance. But free doesn’t mean low quality.
This is a genuine paid add-on from our underwriters that we pay out of our own commission. That is because we believe in being an insurer that truly cares for its customers by offering the best cover we can.
Get a quote today and see how we can protect you.
Legal Assistance Home Insurance Features
Our legal assistance home insurance includes a 24/7 legal helpline that’s open 365 days a year. We hope you don’t need legal help on Christmas day, but if you do it is there for you.
We also include a variety of other legal expenses including:
- Consumer disputes – if you have been refused a service as a breach of the Equalities Act then your legal fees may be covered.
- Personal injury claims
- Civil claims as a result of loss or damage to goods in the home
- Professional fees as a result of an in-depth tax enquiry by HM Revenue & Customs.
- Some criminal prosecution defence claims
- Breaches in a school admissions policy
- Probate disputes
- Identity theft
Before buying any legal expenses policy, make sure to check all the terms and conditions as well as the exclusions. In particular, you should not assume that the top or cheapest policy on a comparison site is the best for you. The same goes for the ads you see at the top of a Google search.
Lots of insurance add-ons are prone to being “shiny objects” that brokers throw in for an extra fee that may not actually be useful to you.
For instance, a lot of insurers will require you to use their legal professionals. At Emerald Life you can choose to use your own providing you inform us and we’ll only pay up to the amount our own lawyers would charge.
Also pay attention to timing. It is very unlikely you will be able to claim for an issue you already knew about. But equally, we require you to inform us about a potential claim within 30 days of the event.
Importantly, most insurers including ourselves require a reasonable chance of success in order to pay out. That means you must inform us – or the insurer you go with – before you start taking any legal action and paying fees.
If we deem the cost of settlement to be less than the cost of defending a case through the legal system, then we may just pay it. That could potentially save the emotional ordeal of a lengthy legal battle so you can get back to living your life in peace.
In terms of perks that Emerald Life offers that other insurers may not, we make a big point of offering discrimination cover.
For instance, if you are refused a product or service because of who you are and in breach of the 2011 Equalities Act then you may be able to get legal assistance.
We also provide cover for defamation including online trolling. These are part of Emerald’s continuing mission to bring more equality and diversity to financial services.
A big part of Emerald’s mission in particular is helping women. Having started by focusing on the LGBT+ market, we quickly found that a lot of the big issues faced by the 20 -30% of the population who identify as LGBT+ are also faced by the 50% of the population who identify as female.
And despite progress being slowly but surely made in other industries, insurance and financial services has been left behind.
Employment issues and social media trolling are just some of the issues women are disproportionately affected by and could potentially be helped by our legal assistance home insurance. And of course when things seem particularly bad and you don’t know what to do, a 24/7 helpline could be a valuable asset.
