Your Team Feels Like Family. That’s Exactly Why You Need EPLI.

Walk into almost any dental practice in America and ask the doctor about their staff, and you’ll hear some version of the same thing:

“We’re like a family here.”

And honestly? It’s usually true. You see your hygienist more than you see your own siblings. Your front desk lead has been with you since you opened the doors. Your office manager remembers your kids’ birthdays. You’ve gone to weddings, sent flowers when their parents passed, and thrown the office Christmas party at your own house.

So when someone brings up Employment Practices Liability Insurance, or EPLI, the reaction is almost always the same:

“That’s not us. My team would never sue me.”

I get it. I really do. But after years of helping dental practices recover from the lawsuits they “never saw coming,” I have to be honest with you: that mindset is exactly what makes you vulnerable.

What EPLI Covers

Let’s get the basics out of the way. Employment Practices Liability Insurance protects your practice from claims brought by employees, former employees, or even job applicants. The covered claims typically include:

• Wrongful termination, the most common claim by far
• Discrimination based on age, race, gender, disability, pregnancy, religion, or other protected categories
• Sexual harassment, including hostile work environment claims
• Retaliation for firing or punishing someone for raising a complaint
• Wage and hour disputes involving overtime, breaks, and misclassification
• Failure to hire or promote
• Emotional distress tied to employment
• Third-party harassment claims, like a patient claiming a staff member harassed them

EPLI pays for your legal defense, settlements, and judgments. And that matters more than people realize, because you don’t have to lose to lose money. You just have to get sued.

The “We’re Family” Trap

Here’s the hard truth about treating your practice like a family: families fight. Families have falling-outs. Families stop talking. And when families end up in conflict, the wounds tend to be deeper, not shallower, than between strangers.

The same is true at work. The hygienist who’s been with you for twelve years isn’t less likely to sue you than the one you hired last month. She may actually be more likely to, because the breakup feels personal. There’s history. There’s a sense of betrayal on both sides. And when emotions run high, lawyers get phone calls.

This is the single most common myth in small business insurance: “We’re like family here, so we don’t need EPLI.” It’s also the most expensive one.

The data tells a different story. A business is three times more likely to be sued by an employee than to experience a fire. You wouldn’t dream of running your practice without fire insurance. So why are roughly 70% of small businesses operating without EPLI?

The Things That Happen

Let me describe a few scenarios that have played out in real dental practices. None of these involve villains. None involve a doctor doing anything obviously wrong. They’re just life.

Scenario 1: Wrongful termination. You and your office manager have a serious disagreement about how to handle a coding issue. The relationship deteriorates over a few months. You eventually let her go. She files a wrongful termination suit, and during discovery her attorney requests every email, every text, every message, including the ones where you vented to your associate about her performance. You know the firing was justified. Proving it in court is a different story.

Scenario 2: Age discrimination. Your hygienist has been with you for fifteen years. She’s wonderful with patients and part of the family, but her production has dropped, she’s slower than she used to be, and her chart notes are sloppy. You finally have a hard conversation and let her go. Three weeks later, you get a letter from her attorney alleging age discrimination. She’s 58.

Scenario 3: Wage and hour dispute. A former front desk employee files a claim alleging she was misclassified, didn’t receive proper overtime pay for the times she stayed late to close out the day, and wasn’t given her legally required meal breaks during busy stretches. She’s also recruiting two current employees to join the claim. You believed your payroll setup was compliant. Now you’re facing a multi-employee wage and hour action and the department of labor wants to audit your records going back three years.

In every single one of these cases, the doctor was a good person trying to run a good practice. And in every single one, the legal bill was somewhere between catastrophic and ruinous.

The Numbers Will Get Your Attention

Here’s where the math becomes impossible to ignore.

Even when you do nothing wrong, defending an employment claim costs real money. Even if a charge is baseless, the legal discovery costs to simply secure a dismissal average about $50,000.¹ The average jury award is about $250,000; if a case settles, the judgment averages $75,000. And the cost of defense averages about $120,000 per claim.¹

Read that one more time. Fifty thousand dollars to make a baseless claim go away.

The picture gets worse over time. The Insurance Information Institute reported the median cost of an employment practices related claim in 2021 was $258,500 compared to $83,000 in 2015.² That’s a 211% increase in just six years, far exceeding economic inflation.

And here’s the part most dentists don’t realize: settlement isn’t a sign you did something wrong. There’s been an uptick in EPLI claims recently, with insurers moving toward settling these claims rather than fighting them in court.³ Why? Because settling for $40,000 is cheaper than spending $200,000 to win at trial. Insurers do the math. So even fully innocent claims often end with a check being written.

Now compare that to what EPLI actually costs. Small American businesses with fewer than 50 employees typically spend between $1,000 and $3,000 per year on EPLI premiums.⁴ That amount is small compared to the potential cost of a single lawsuit.

A single dismissed claim costs more than 15 years of premiums.

“But I’m a Good Boss” Isn’t a Defense

I want to address this head-on, because it’s the most common pushback I hear: “I treat my people well. I pay above market. I’m fair. I’d never discriminate.”

I believe you. None of that protects you.

Here’s why: you don’t have to be guilty to be sued. You don’t have to be wrong to lose. And being a good boss doesn’t immunize you against:

• An employee who genuinely believes she was discriminated against, even if she wasn’t
• A former employee who’s hurting financially and sees a payday
• A spouse, parent, or new boyfriend who tells the former employee, “you should sue them”
• An attorney who files a charge knowing the practice will likely settle to avoid defense costs
• An honest misunderstanding that grows into something neither of you can stop

EPLI covers claims regardless of whether your business is actually at fault. Even if the allegations are unfounded, you’ll need legal representation, which can be extremely costly without insurance.

The legal system doesn’t care that you’re a good person. It cares about documentation, process, and proof. And those are things even the best-run practices sometimes get wrong without realizing it.

The Termination Problem

Let’s talk about the single biggest source of EPLI claims: terminations.

You will, at some point, have to fire someone you love. Not because they’re a bad person, but because they’re not the right person for the role anymore, or because the practice has changed, or because something happened that can’t be unseen. This is one of the hardest parts of being a practice owner, and almost no one in dental school prepares you for it.

Here’s the trap: because you care about this person, you delay. You give them more chances. You don’t document the conversations. You finally let them go after a particularly bad week, and the termination feels emotional and abrupt to them, even if it’s been building for months in your head.

And now their attorney has a story: “She was a model employee for ten years with no documented issues, and was fired without warning shortly after [she turned 50 / she got pregnant / she requested medical leave / she complained about a coworker].”

You know that’s not what happened. But proving it costs $50,000 minimum, even if you’re completely right.

What EPLI Buys You

This is the piece that gets undersold. People think of EPLI as “the policy that pays the settlement.” It’s much more than that.

When you have EPLI and an employment claim hits, here’s what happens:

1. You call your carrier, not your buddy who happens to be a lawyer
2. The carrier assigns experienced employment defense counsel, attorneys who do this every day, not someone winging it
3. Defense costs are covered from dollar one (after your retention/deductible)
4. Settlement decisions are made strategically, not based on what you can afford
5. Your reputation has a chance of being protected, since these things tend to leak when you’re scrambling

Many EPLI carriers also include risk management resources before any claim happens, like model employee handbooks, termination checklists, manager training, and an HR hotline. Used correctly, those resources alone can prevent claims from ever being filed.

EPLI Is Important for Your Practice

I’m not going to tell you to stop loving your team. The thing that makes a great dental practice is exactly that: a doctor who genuinely cares about the people who work there, who shows up for them, who builds something more than just a business.

But love and legal protection are not the same thing.

You can adore every person in your practice and still need EPLI. You can run the most ethical, supportive, generous practice in your zip code and still get sued. You can do everything right and still have to write a six-figure check to defend yourself against a claim that has no merit.

The question isn’t whether you trust your team. The question is whether you can afford to bet your practice (your retirement, your home, your kids’ college fund) on the assumption that nothing will ever go wrong with anyone who’s ever worked for you, ever.

For somewhere between $1,000 and $3,000 a year, you don’t have to make that bet.

If you don’t have EPLI, let’s get you a quote. If you do have it, let’s pull the policy out and look at your limits, your deductible, and what’s actually covered, especially third-party coverage, wage and hour endorsements, and whether defense costs erode your limits.

Your team is family. Protect the practice that makes that family possible.

Have questions about EPLI for your practice? We’d be happy to walk through your current coverage and identify any gaps.