Pen Underwriting and Bridgehaven enter strategic partnership on Solicitors’ PI
Published On : 18 Aug 2025
Pen Underwriting, the multi-class multi-territory managing general agent (MGA), can today announce a new strategic partnership with Bridgehaven Specialty UK Limited (Bridgehaven), the UK’s leading risk-taking hybrid insurer, in support of the UK solicitors’ professional indemnity (PI) market. The new agreement sees Bridgehaven provide capacity for Pen’s diverse solicitors’ PI portfolio and underwriting footprint, which ranges from select sole practitioner risks up to firms with 20 or more partners.
Pen’s broad underwriting appetite and experience covers both high street firms undertaking a mix of work and specialist firms, focusing on a wide range of areas from personal injury and criminal law to family law and immigration. Through the in-house expertise of solicitors’ PI claims specialists and its team of experienced, technical trading underwriters, Pen has provided continuous support for the solicitors’ PI market for 25 years – ever since the law profession switched to the commercial market and moved away from its mutual indemnity fund in 2000.
Commenting on the new collaboration, Tom Downey, CEO of Pen Underwriting, said: “We are excited to be embarking on this new strategic partnership with Bridgehaven. Since its launch two years ago, as the UK’s first specialist risk-taking hybrid insurer, we have been impressed by the team, their ambition and backing of our sector. Their operating model and ethos of working with MGAs based on transparency and trust, their focus on collaborative risk-sharing and their long-term approach to partnership and performance, resonate with our own priorities."
“With an increasingly important, burgeoning MGA marketplace in the UK and Pen a mature underwriting and distribution business, part of our challenge is how to manage the strong demand from a growing group of different parties keen to partner with us. Alongside our valued long-term insurer partners there is space to create new-style collaborations, including fronting insurers and reinsurers aligned to our approach, strategy and strengths, just as in this new partnership. We’re very much looking forward to working together.”
Paul Jewell, CEO of Bridgehaven, said: “We’re delighted to bring our hybrid insurance model with the transparent relationships it fosters, to Pen Underwriting and its specialist solicitors’ PI portfolio. Our focus is on enabling MGAs, insurers and reinsurers to collaborate more effectively, matching appetites and mutual interests. Our aspiration is to be the leading hybrid insurer supporting innovative, well positioned MGAs and partner with them to grow highly profitable and therefore sustainable portfolios. We are excited to be in partnership with Pen as they continue their journey.”
On the suitability of solicitors’ PI for the new collaboration with Bridgehaven, Tom Downey added: “As a specialist class, solicitors’ PI naturally lends itself to this new form of capacity partnership for Pen, with our 25-year track record of disciplined sustainable underwriting and continuous support of UK law firms. Bridgehaven and our reinsurer partners can trust us to get on with what we do best – in terms of knowing our customers, the risks they present and delivering the excellent service brokers need – to produce positive results for all.”
