General liability helps when your business injures someone or damages their property. We explain the limits, exclusions, and contract requirements before work begins.
General liability is written in parts, and contracts usually care about specific ones.
Someone is injured at your location, or your work injures someone or damages property at a job site. A customer falls in your shop; a subcontractor's ladder goes through a client's window. This is the core of the policy and the part most people picture when they hear liability.
Claims arising after the work is finished or the product has left your hands. For contractors this is often the more important half of the policy, because construction defect claims surface long after the job closes. Whether completed operations remains in force — and for how long after you stop work — is a detail worth confirming.
Libel, slander, copyright infringement in advertising, and misappropriation of ideas. Increasingly relevant for any business with a marketing presence, and a section most owners have never read.
Most commercial contracts require you to name the other party as an additional insured, sometimes with primary and non-contributory wording and a waiver of subrogation. These endorsements change who the policy protects and in what order. Signing a contract that demands terms your policy does not carry is a common and avoidable problem.
Contracts often dictate several of these, which is why we read the contract too.
Usually because it was asked to do something it was never written to do.
General liability covers damage your work causes to other property, not the cost of redoing the work itself. That distinction is at the heart of most contractor disputes with their insurer, and it is better understood before a claim than during one.
Errors in professional judgment, design, or advice fall to professional liability, not general liability. Any business that gets paid partly for what it knows needs both.
A contract requiring primary and non-contributory coverage or a specific additional insured form, signed before anyone checked whether the policy carries it. The certificate gets issued; the coverage does not exist.
The aggregate is the most the policy will pay across the whole term. Several moderate claims can exhaust it and leave nothing for the rest of the year.
The questions that come up when a contract lands on someone's desk.
It extends your policy's protection to them for liability arising out of your work. It is a real change to the policy, not a piece of paperwork — and the specific endorsement form matters, because forms differ in whether they cover ongoing operations, completed operations, or both. Send us the contract and we will match the endorsement to what it actually requires.
No. Employee injuries go to workers' compensation. General liability covers third parties — customers, visitors, and other people's property. Businesses need both, and the line between them is one of the cleanest divisions in commercial insurance.
A BOP packages general liability with commercial property, usually at a better price than buying them separately. The liability inside a BOP is general liability. Larger or more complex operations eventually outgrow the package and move to separate policies.
An occurrence policy responds to incidents that happen during the policy period, whenever the claim is filed. A claims-made policy responds only while it is in force, which is why tail coverage matters if you switch or close. General liability is usually occurrence-based; professional liability often is not.
Most certificate problems are contract problems. We would rather read the agreement before you sign it.
