General Liability

Occurrence limits, additional insureds, and what GL does not do

General liability is written on an occurrence form, which means what matters is when the injury or damage happened, not when the claim arrives. A slip in your lobby this year is covered by this year's policy even if the lawsuit shows up three years later. That is a meaningfully better structure than claims-made, and it is why the policy you cancel today keeps responding to yesterday's events.

Read the limits as a set. The per-occurrence limit caps any single loss; the general aggregate caps everything the policy will pay in the term; and a separate products and completed operations aggregate caps claims arising from work you finished or products you sold. Rating is by class code against receipts, payroll, or square footage, so the premium moves with the size of the operation and is trued up at audit.

Most of the endorsement traffic on a GL policy comes from contracts. A general contractor or landlord will require additional insured status — often for both ongoing and completed operations — plus primary and non-contributory wording so their policy sits behind yours, and a waiver of subrogation so your carrier cannot come back at them. Those are three distinct endorsements. A certificate of insurance simply reports what the policy says; it cannot add coverage the policy does not contain, which is why we want to see the insurance exhibit before you sign, not after the certificate is requested.

Know the boundary. General liability pays for injury to other people and damage to other people's property. It does not pay to redo your own defective work, it does not cover professional advice, and it does not cover injury to your own employees — those are the your-work exclusion, professional liability, and workers' compensation respectively. Most of the coverage arguments we see start with someone assuming general liability was general.