About Gulf Atlantic
At Gulf Atlantic, we believe physicians deserve straightforward, affordable protection against the rising costs of legal defense.
Traditional malpractice insurance has become one of the biggest financial burdens for doctors — with premiums climbing while coverage often fails to meet real needs.
Gulf Atlantic is a leader in providing legal defense insurance defending doctors who self-insure or "go bare."
Florida Legal Defense Insurance
Assume you’ve decided to self-insure and have protected your assets. If a claim is made against you, you must aggressively defend it, both to defeat it and to position you for a favorable settlement if settlement is necessary.
Gulf Atlantic’s legal defense policy was developed during the malpractice crisis of the early 2000’s as a solution to the unavailability and affordability of malpractice insurance. Many doctors were being forced to self insure due to the lack of availability and/or the costs involved. Premiums in South Florida for more litigious specialties were reaching $200,000 for a policy offering $250,000 in coverage. After tort reform, the availability of malpractice insurance rebounded and prices moderated – for a time. In recent years, however, malpractice costs have continued to go up particularly if you’ve experienced a claim in your past.
If you’ve chosen to self-insure, you no longer have to pay malpractice premiums. But you continue to have liability exposure – and exposure for the costs of defending the claim. A legal expense insurance policy handles the second part of the equation. Gulf Atlantic’s standard policy provides $100,000 in defense costs per claim, with a $200,000 annual aggregate cap. Worried that a potential claim could be more expensive? You can purchase increased limits of liability in $25,000 increments. Our policy is structured just like a claims-made insurance policy, and we can provide full prior acts coverage. We offer tail coverage, but we do not offer free tail upon retirement or death.
At fully mature rates, you can expect a Gulf Atlantic Legal Defense policy to cost about 15-20% of a traditional medical malpractice policy. So if your malpractice renewal premium is $100,000, you can expect your Gulf Atlantic policy to cost somewhere between $15,000 and $20,000. With Gulf Atlantic, you can pay your premium in cash, by check or by credit card, and we offer installment premium payment plans without imposing any finance fees or credit card premiums. Optional additional coverages for Medicare/Medicaid defense and licensing action defense are available at a nominal charge.
If you should have a claim while you’re insured with Gulf Atlantic (and we truly hope you won’t), you can select defense counsel from our panel of defense attorneys, all of whom are respected medical malpractice defense firms located throughout the State of Florida (You’ll probably know them--or of them), or you can select any attorney you choose to represent you. If you select from our panel counsel, we’ll pay 100% of their fees up to our limits of liability.
If you elect to go outside of our panel, and they are experienced malpractice attorneys, we will first attempt to add them to our panel. But if you want to select your brother-in-law the bond lawyer to defend you (and we can’t convince you otherwise), we’ll only pay a reduced percentage of their fees, subject to a cap. In addition to attorneys’ fees, we’ll pay court costs, expert witness fees, and other expenses associated with the case, subject to our limits of liability.
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