The Risk Nobody Is Properly Insuring
Ask most business owners what their most valuable asset is. They’ll say their people, their technology, or their brand. Ask whether those things are insured, and you’ll usually get a pause.
Intellectual property (patents, trademarks, copyrights, trade secrets, proprietary software) is what separates most modern businesses from their competitors. It’s what makes them worth acquiring, worth backing, and worth building. Yet the majority of businesses, from scaling SaaS companies to established tech firms, have no specific insurance to protect any of it.
IP disputes don’t give you much warning. They arrive as a cease and desist letter, a patent challenge from a well resourced competitor, or a lawsuit filed by a former partner. When they do, you need specialist lawyers, a clear strategy, and the money to fight or enforce your position. Without IP insurance, all of that comes straight out of working capital that was supposed to fund growth.
Trade Secrets: More Than You Think
Most people are comfortable with the headline categories of IP — patents, trademarks, copyright. Trade secrets tend to get less attention, which is ironic given how much of what makes a business competitive sits in this category.
Under UK and EU law, a trade secret is any business information that has commercial value because it isn’t publicly known, and that you take reasonable steps to keep confidential. In practice that covers a lot of ground: client lists and what those clients pay, pricing structures and margin logic, proprietary methodologies, software architecture, supplier terms, and your forward sales pipeline.
If your business has built any kind of competitive advantage, a meaningful portion of what creates that advantage is a trade secret. And the issue is what happens when they are compromised.
Hiring Well Can Create Unexpected Exposure
When we imagine IP claims, most people imagine it will be triggered by aggressive competitor. However, it can actually be triggered by your hiring decision.
You bring in a senior person from a rival firm. They’re talented, they know the market, and they hit the ground running. A few months later, their former employer files a lawsuit alleging trade secret misappropriation, breach of a non-compete, and misuse of confidential client data — naming both your new hire and your business as defendants.
You didn’t take anything. Your new colleague maintains everything they’re contributing is independently developed. But you’re now in litigation, facing a potential injunction, and spending heavily on legal fees before you’ve had the chance to demonstrate that.
This plays out regularly across software, AI, healthcare technology, and professional services. IP insurance covers the defence costs, any compensation payments, and access to specialist legal representation from day one. It also works in reverse: if a departing employee takes your trade secrets to a competitor, pursuit cover means you can act on the strength of your case rather than the size of your legal budget.
Claims Across Every Sector
There’s a common assumption that IP disputes are something that happens to large corporations with vast patent portfolios. That’s not what we see.
A mid-sized software developer receives a cease and desist letter alleging patent infringement over a core product feature. They believe their technology is entirely distinct but four months of negotiations and six figures of legal costs later, they secure a licence to continue trading. That is time and money taken from the next stage of your development.
An eHealth startup discovers a competitor has incorporated elements of their platform without authorisation. The evidence is strong. But funding a pursuit means specialist lawyers, months of management attention, and no guarantee of timing. Without insurance, many businesses absorb the loss. The infringement continues.
A technology hardware company faces a validity challenge to its core patent from a multinational with a large legal team. Even where the patent works, the cost of the defence is significant and completely uninsured.
They’re the kinds of claims we’re seeing regularly across software, AI, technology hardware and digital health.
Don’t Forget the Offensive Side
Most people think of IP insurance as protection against being sued. That’s only half of it.
If a competitor has incorporated your patented technology into their product, if a former partner is still using your software after the contract ended, if someone has filed a patent application on technology your team built — you have the right to act. But acting costs money. Specialist lawyers, legal proceedings, management time, and potentially months of uncertainty before you recover anything.
For many businesses, they can’t afford the fight. So the infringement goes unchallenged and the competitive damage builds quietly over time.
Pursuit cover changes that. It funds the enforcement of your own rights across patent infringement, trademark infringement, trade secret misappropriation, and breach of contract — so your decision to act is based on the merits of your case, not whether you can carry the cost.
What Your PI Policy Probably Doesn’t Cover
Many businesses assume their Professional Indemnity policy picks up IP related claims. In practice, the gap between assumption and reality is significant.
A standard PI policy may respond to copyright or trademark infringement defence in certain circumstances. But patent infringement (one of the most serious IP risks for any technology business) is typically excluded. Ownership disputes, validity challenges, patent oppositions, and any form of pursuit cover are almost universally absent. And because PI is usually written as an insurer’s duty to defend, you often have no say in which law firm is appointed, a real disadvantage when the matter requires genuine specialist expertise.
A standalone IP policy covers the full spectrum on both sides, and lets you retain choice over your legal representation. T
Why Investors Are Starting to Look at This
There’s one dimension to IP risk that doesn’t get discussed enough: what it means when you’re raising capital.
As a business moves through a Series A or into a Series B, sophisticated investors will look at the IP position carefully. They want to know patents are defensible, trademarks are clean, and that a legal dispute with a competitor can’t pull the capital they’re deploying away from the growth plan and into a courtroom.
IP insurance addresses that concern directly. It signals that the management team understands their risk landscape and has taken steps to protect the asset base. The money invested goes into hiring, product, and markets — not into funding litigation that could and should have been insured.
In competitive fundraising environments, that kind of governance detail matters. It’s the difference between a business that’s serious about deploying capital well, and one that has an uninsured liability sitting quietly in the background.
Who Should Be Thinking About This?
Any business where IP is a meaningful part of its commercial value — which in practice means most technology, software, AI and digital health businesses, as well as any company that has hired from competitors or signed contractual indemnities with clients.
The cost of IP insurance is a fraction of the cost of a single uninsured claim. More to the point, it means that when a dispute arrives, and increasingly it’s a matter of when rather than if, your business can respond properly, without drawing on the capital you need to grow.
Want to understand your IP exposure? Get in touch and book in a Cover Review.
