Legal protection insurance

Banks, Insurances & Third Pillar
1

Hi everyone,

I moved to Switzerland in January this year and, being new to the Swiss system, I initially followed a friend’s advice and took out legal protection insurance with Allianz, along with the “mandatory” personal liability and household insurance.

As the renewal date approaches, I’m reconsidering whether it makes sense to keep the legal protection insurance. For context: I don’t own property in Switzerland, I don’t have a car (though that might change in the near future), and work as a regular employee. I’m generally a quiet person and have never been involved in any legal disputes.

Given this, I’m wondering whether legal protection insurance is really necessary in my situation.
I would appreciate hearing your thoughts or personal experiences on this.

Thanks a lot

2

I have been leaving in Switzerland for 5 years without it and recently registered for Dextra through Viac for 240chf/year.

My logic will be to use it in case of dispute at work or to contest rent increase above legal threshold. It could help cover lawyer administration fees (e.g. Asloca).

What does your cover and for how much ?

3

The guiding principle: self-insure small, manageable risks, but transfer catastrophic risks to insurers.

For me that means: Personal liability with 10M coverage and high deductible, yes. Household insurance and legal protection, no.

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4

The first year, the premium was CHF 226, but from the second year it will increase to CHF 331.
The policy includes the following coverage:

  • Individual legal protection insurance
  • Traffic legal protection
  • Private legal protection

The documents I received are in Italian, so these may not be an accurate English translation.

I must admit that I did not look into the details of each coverage carefully at the time, as I was quite overwhelmed with all the administrative tasks that came with moving to Switzerland. However, I would now like to review the policy properly and make sure that, starting next year, I only pay for the coverage I actually need.

5

I would check what each protects against.

I find it useful to have an entry point in order to get information about my rights and chances to win regarding potential conflicts with my employer (the reason I have it) and conflicts with my landlord (the reason I’ve used it once).

If you don’t expect to have one such conflict, it’s probably not worth its cost in my opinion. If you do, I find the peace of mind of being guided through the process very valuable (though one should be aware that their intent isn’t to make you win your case but to mitigate your financial harm - functionally, it’s what we should be after. Emotionally, it might not.)

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6

My experience with legal protection insurance in Switzerland is that they are poor value for the money. I had one for some years (chose after doing some research and reading many reviews). I contacted them a couple of times on various matters, most of their advice (done by students I believe) could be googled in a couple of minutes. On one occasion, they refused to support me in a valid case I had to bring up against the landlord (I was able to reach a suitable settlement at the arbitration authority on my own). Then came the most interesting case - there was another property rental-related case.

I contacted my legal insurance, described my case, they called me to discuss and then announced (to my surprise actually, because one year ago they refused to cover similar case) that they will be hiring a lawyer to deal with my problem. I asked explicitly if I will need to pay anything, they answered that they will be covering all relevant expenses. They hired the lawyer who started working, did some work and asked some additional questions about the case background. The insurance company, who was reading the correspondence between me and the lawyer (btw, is that not supposed to be confidential, even though I had nothing to hide), then suddenly decided that my case is not covered! (based on some new background facts about the details of the case which they neglected to clarify before hiring the lawyer). But this is exactly why I have contacted them in the first place - to find out if my case is covered or not!
So the insurance company basically hired the lawyer and then jumped the ship, leaving me with the bill for the job lawyer has already done (plus of course the bills for the future work, because once the process with the lawyer is started one cannot easily proceed without him). Of course I would not have hired the lawyer on my own and would handle this case differently and with much lower cost. So, in the end I had to pay the premiums for their “coverage“ and also for the lawyer, whom I would never hired otherwise.

Summary: there is an exclusion for everything, so just keep the premium to cover some of the legal costs - in case you will actually have them, which in my experience is not very common.

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