General Liability Insurance, Variations and Coverage Summary

By Dean Markham

The current Insurance Services Office (ISO) Commercial General Liability (CGL) Coverage Form is comprehensive in nature. It insures the bodily injury and property damage exposures of commercial ventures. It may be written as a monoline policy or combined with other lines of to form a Commercial Package Policy (CPP). This comprehensive nature of the form eliminates having to select and group individual or specific hazards, with the resulting potential gaps in coverage. Coverage applies to:

Premises liability arising out of the ownership, maintenance or use of the premises;

Products liability for goods and products manufactured, sold or distributed;

Completed operations liability for services provided or work done for others;

Personal injury liability and advertising injury liability of the insured; and

Medical payments coverage.

Each of these coverage's is subject to certain policy definitions, exclusions and limitations.

The basic CGL coverage form can be tailored with a number and variety of optional forms and endorsements that broaden, delete, restrict, add or modify the form's basic coverage's to result in a coverage form specifically designed for the individual insured.

ISO developed two CGL coverage forms for general use;

CG 00 01, is the "occurrence" form. It covers losses where the injury or damage occurs during the covered policy period, regardless of when the company is notified of the loss or claim. The key to this coverage approach is the date of loss or the period of time when the loss occurs.

CG 00 02 is the "claims-made" coverage form. With this form, coverage is triggered by the actual filing date or receipt of the claim, in addition to the date or period of time in which the loss or injury occurs. This form handles any covered loss or claim filed during the policy period, regardless of when the actual loss or injury occurred. This is subject to the retroactive date indicated on the declarations. While the retroactive date can be any date, for complete protection it should be the first date that claims-made coverage was applied to the risk. This is because an occurrence coverage form applies to any loss or damage before that date. Claims-made coverage applies only to covered losses occurring after the retroactive date.

commercial insurance quotes for all business types @ http://www.mcisinc.com Listed are some of the numerous different companies that write this general liability coverage: AIG, American Safety, Arrowhead, Burlington-Guilford, Century Surety, CNA, CorerX, Evanston, Gemini-Vela, General Star, Golden Bear, Hartford, Lexington, Liberty International, Liberty Surplus, Lloyds of London-SHG, Markel, Maxum, Mt. Hawley, National Environmental, National Liberty & Fire, Nevada Risk, No. American Capacity, OneBeacon, ProBuilders, RLI, Safeco, Scottsdale, Travelers, United National, Western Risk & Zurich.