Depends on:

...your assets
...the legal structure of the firm -corporation, partnership (no!), sole proprietership, etc.
...the type of work that you are doing: condos, public buildings, restaurants/nightclubs, multi-residential, single family residential (in order of riskiest to least risky)
...what State you are in (some States require general liability and/or E/O.

If you fill in some of the blanks we can be more helpful.

if you design to not get sued, then you'll end up with really ugly concrete boxes. just look at the freedom tower...

the insurance is a small price to pay for sleeping at night if you are pushing your limits and expanding your markets/building types/project complexity. some project types are more suit happy, but any project can go bad. A few offices ago got sued for workers comp for a bus-boy who fell off a roof ladder. doh! why is bus-boy being sent up to the roof?????? people are stupid and stupid people want to blame somebody else for their problems. get the insurance, it is part of being a responsible professional.

I second Treekiller's opinion. I personally have never worked for an office without insurance, and frankly didnt know that it was an option to not carry it...

I can only imagine you'd find it really restricting without it.

good topic

thanks for the responses. My intention is not to make this topic only about insurance. i guess a better question might be this: how many, and what safeguards with respect to construction documents are there just to protect architects against themselves?

Let's assume we are being legal but kinda under the radar, state minimum insurance, sole proprietorship, LLC or similar legal structure, single-family high-end residential design, possibly design-build, clients referred by previous clients/friends, some work with developers doing spec houses...
let's also assume you are smart and diligent enough to design details not to leak/collapse/perform other than intended/not void manufacturer's warranties...

what i am getting at is that when you are in a big firm you have to package the work into little bits and hand it off to another team. like the partner and senior designer do the concept design package, proposal, they hand it off to a team who does a schematic design package under a project manager's supervision, DD maybe the same people, CD phase half the people quit and you hire new ones, by the time you get to construction someone new is doing CA...
you have to standardize it so anyone can work on it.

but if you are on your own you can keep it simple and cut a lot of corners in design/production.

but what corners can you cut when you are doing construction documents?

can you cut out a bunch of specs? put specs on the drawings?
what details can you not bother with until you get a phone call from the GC (instead of an RFI)...
you can do some shop drawings more effectively than the contractor sometimes...
contracts can be in the form of a letter if you don't want to buy the AIA version...
can you leave out unnecessary insurance?

talk to your insurance carrier about what you need. (also a good way to read whether he's working for you or himself.) mine, instead of selling me an umbrella policy for all liability, let me purchase coverage by the project and only for those projects which were big enough that he felt insurance would be worth it. >i spent very little on insurance.

contracts: you have to judge by the project. how much protection do you want? how much contract language does your client want? i had one project that ended in litigation. i had prepared an aia contract for use between the owner and contractor but NONE for me with the owner. just a signed proposal letter. in this situation i WAS NOT determined to be a party to the construction contract and was not implicated in the dispute. i had no official relationship with the contractor. my biggest responsibility ended up being a 4 hr deposition...

of course it helped that my cds were tight.

we are a small office who has gotten sued (by the clients) because the clients dont want to follow typical protocal (hiring a contractor...following drawings...etc). Their project ends up fucked up and they turn around and blame us. This is why it is important to have information on the drawings and in your spec.

If you want to do mostly interiors, ( which is probably the easiest way to make money ), then you probably won't need insurance. However, if you're doing base buildings, and especially if you're doing anything public/city related, it is best to get insured...- and ask Steven Ward who his insurer is: - project based coverage sounds very appealing to me...

nonarchitect, not that i agree or disagree of what you said, what makes you think you needn't have insurance if you are designing interiors? it seems like things are more prone to go wrong when you have so many visible products that effects people's health and etc.. never mind the installation mishaps and designers oversight.
just curious..

By interior projects I mean projects where you don't have to have city work permits. There are less legal liabilities when you don't have to go through the city's building dept. for permits, etc, so at least you don't have to worry abt. violations. Of course if you have to re-gut, or change zoning then its a different story..

one school of thought ... if you don't carry insurance and you don't have any significant assets, then you're not an attractive target of legal action. lawyers will go looking for somebody else, with deeper pockets, to sue.

it's one way to look at it ... but, i don't recommend that approach.

i can't imagine practicing in today's world without a decent amount of e&o coverage. it can be expensive, but not nearly so expensive as the alternative.

I would agree that interior projects would have a much less liability down the road, but on the other hand I think that code violations may be the least of my worries ... I'm much comfortable with my knowledge in code minuta than construction quality control ... that's why design build is a great way to go.

yes, and beware of any clients who don't want to take a traditional path of hiring a GC (to cover the liability) and prefer to be the pseudo GC themselves to save $ and overhead ... this will be mess, and they will very likely point fingers all along the way.,

On another somewhat related note. . . with all due respect as I don't know you from Adam, six years experience is not that much considering that you jumped around so much. Six years experience at a single office would have put you much farther along in your career. That is where my concerns would be.

The limitations of liability written into your contracts and the completeness of your cd's are, of course, necessary. But, the biggest factor is you. How you handle problems, how you solve issues before they become problems and how you manage the clients and their expectations, etc. is far and away the most important liability limitors that you can possess.