Your Indemnity Renewal Has a Regulator. Your Other Contracts Don't.

The SRA Indemnity Insurance Rules require an authorised body to take out and maintain qualifying cover for each indemnity period, and to arrange replacement cover before the existing policy expires. It is worth being precise about what that does and does not mean, because the internet is full of people overstating it.

It does not mean a lapse is an instant regulatory breach. The rules provide an Extended Policy Period, and then a Cessation Period, as escalating stages. There is a runway, and it is deliberate.

What it does mean is that the deadline is hard commercially and carries escalating regulatory consequences the longer it goes unresolved. It is also worth noting that the single industry-wide renewal date was abolished over a decade ago. Around three quarters of firms still renew on 1 October, but that is habit and market convention rather than a rule, and a firm on a different cycle is not doing anything wrong.

None of which changes the practical point. That renewal gets attention because a chain of people outside the firm are paid to make sure it does.

Here is the rough shape of what a thirty-fee-earner practice is committed to at any moment, beyond the obvious premises and insurance:

• Case and practice management software, usually the largest single line, often on a multi-year term
• Legal research and know-how subscriptions, frequently two overlapping ones because different teams prefer different publishers
• Document management and archive storage, where the physical storage contract and the digital one renew on different dates
• An e-signature or verification tool, bought during a specific matter and never reviewed since
• Anti-money-laundering and identity checking, often per-check billing with a minimum commitment
• Telephony, broadband, dictation, and the accounts package

Each one has a notice period. Several of them renew automatically. The notice periods are not the same as each other, and they are frequently longer than people assume - ninety days is common in legal software, which means the decision point is three months before a date nobody has written down.

The failure is not that a firm chooses badly. It is that the choice never arrives. The renewal happens, the invoice arrives, and the question of whether the tool is still the right one is answered by default.

This is the part most firms get wrong even when they do keep a list.

A contract with a ninety-day notice period and a renewal on 1 March does not need attention in February. It needs attention by 30 November. After that date the renewal is no longer a decision - it has already happened, and the invoice is a formality.

So a renewal calendar built on renewal dates is a calendar of things you can no longer change. The useful date is the last day you can act, and it is a different number for every contract, because the notice periods differ. Working it out means reading each agreement, finding the clause, and doing the arithmetic backwards from the renewal.

That is dull, and it is exactly the kind of dull that gets deferred in a practice where the billable work always has a nearer deadline.

The indemnity renewal works because three things exist: a known date, a person who owns it, and a reminder that arrives early enough to act on. None of those three requires a regulator. They just require somebody to set them up once.

A practical version for a firm that has never done this:

1. Collect every agreement in one place. Not a summary - the actual documents. Most firms find between fifteen and forty, and are surprised by two or three they had forgotten entirely.
2. For each one, record the renewal date and the notice period. Both, separately. One without the other is not usable.
3. Calculate the act-by date and put that in the calendar, not the renewal date. This is the step that converts a list into something that changes outcomes.
4. Give each contract an owner by name. Not a department. The indemnity renewal has a name attached and that is not an accident.
5. Review the three largest before anything else. Concentration is real: in most practices the top three lines are more than half the spend.

September is a sensible month to do it, for a reason that has nothing to do with us. If the firm is already assembling numbers for the indemnity renewal, the finance information is already on the desk. The marginal effort of extending that exercise to the rest of the contract base is smaller in September than it will be in January.

Renewly is built for the fourth step in that list - reading each agreement, pulling out the renewal date and the notice period, working out the date you actually have to act by, and telling you before it passes. It is not an insurance product and it has nothing to do with your indemnity cover. It is for the thirty other contracts that have the same structure and none of the attention.

See how it works

Related reading: Law firms are losing thousands to vendor contracts nobody owns, the notice window is the only date that matters, and who actually owns a renewal.