Celebrity

In the spring of 2022, Ed Sheeran was accused of copying another artist’s track for his hit single “Shape of you” – the most streamed song in Spotify’s history. He spent 11 days in court defending himself at considerable expense. Alice works to ensure that artists of all sorts can afford the legal advice they need to protect themselves if they get sued.

Having left Leeds University where she studied Geography and German, Alice has worked for various broking firms in her career in insurance and now leads a team at Specialty Risk International. Her specialism is explaining to celebrities the risks they face in the digital age and how much it might cost them to defend themselves in court.

“This type of insurance has been available to companies for decades, but in today’s fast moving digital world, artists are increasingly finding they can be accused of misusing other people’s work” says Alice, “and because artists share their work so widely with producers and promoters it is hard to know what has ended up where. And honestly there are a finite number of ways you can compose a tune, so things can sound similar”.

And it is not just traditional artists that face legal issues. Social media influencers need to ensure that they are not going too far in their postings if they criticise others, and celebrities that post memes or any other digital assets can also get into trouble if it looks too much like someone else’s. “The more digital you go, the more complex it gets” continued Alice, “recently a model got sued for posting a picture of herself because the photographer who took the picture had already created an NFT of it.”

This continual evolution, and the ability to think about how the changing world alters the risks we face is one of the reason that Alice loves working in the London insurance market. “You can be incredibly entrepreneurial, thinking about how to adapt existing products so that you can help different groups of people. I started working with financial institutions and have expanded that into a completely different world”.

Thomas’ plan to study sports at college was kicked into touch when he decided that getting started on a career was a better goal. Six years later he is working with wealthy clients to help them when disaster strikes.

After his GCSEs, Thomas was planning on going to college but decided that he wanted to get started on his career so went to work for an insurance company. “I don’t know why I always has a liking for insurance” said Thomas, and he started working in claims as the first port of call when things went wrong. “I was always very curious about what happened next in the process once an accident had happened, that sense of wanting to find out more is a really useful skill in claims which is combination of being a detective and a counsellor”.

After working with several firms in different areas, Thomas joined WTW – an insurance broker, looking after their private clients from the Ipswich office. “This is a really rewarding area to work in. Of course, there is a fun factor of dealing with people you may have heard of, but you are also helping them at a time that is super stressful”. For most of us, the loss of a watch worth tens of thousands of pounds, or damage to expensive bathroom tiles is the stuff of a very different world.

But for Thomas these are people just having a very bad time who need his help. He explains that there are two parts to the job, the first is helping to keep them safe and the second is putting things right. “I make sure my clients understand what things are worth. The values of cars, watches, jewellery etc. will go up and down – you don’t want to lose your watch and find it was under insured. When something has gone wrong it’s about being a people person, empathetic, calm and finding a way through. It about knowledge and expertise”.

As with many things in life, building up experience makes the process easier. “Claims is a career that like wine, gets better with age and experience. We are literally delivering what the client has been paying for” says Thomas. “Clients can be stressed and cross, but we can make it better and, when they say thank you, that means a lot”.