When putting together your business insurance portfolio, one of your most essential benefits will be your commercial general liability (CGL) coverage. It’s there to help you when your mistakes lead to challenges from others that you caused them harm and can ensure you will be able to pick up the pieces of these issues. However, it is only a starting point when it comes to building a comprehensive, far-reaching liability insurance package.
There are numerous liability policy endorsements available, and you can conveniently add these extra benefits into your liability package without causing a significant rate increase. Keep reading to learn more about the added benefits that liability endorsements can provide.
Understanding General Liability Insurance
Liability insurance is designed to protect businesses when their mistakes, however unintentional, cause harm to a third party like a customer. Though you might not have intended for an accident to happen, the fact that it did could obligate your business to repay them for their losses. General liability policies cover many of the most common types of harm a customer might sustain, usually:
- Bodily injuries & accidental medical payments
- Property damage
- Product injuries
- Completed operations liabilities
So, if someone were to fall in your store and get hurt, then they might sue you for their medical bills, lost income and other expenses. Your general liability insurance can help you cover these expenses, as well as the resulting legal fees arising from these challenges.
However, general liability insurance is not full coverage for every unique liability present in a given business. Often, you will need to augment it with coverage endorsements that you add to your insurance portfolio to increase and supplement your benefits.
Why General Liability Insurance Is Just a Starting Point
Physical harm is just one type of loss that your business could cause to someone else. Plus, certain representatives of the business will face higher degrees of liability, including personal responsibility, for accidents that might occur. To get this coverage, consider adding endorsements to your CGL plan.
Endorsements are simple changes to your policy; however, just a minor change can help you increase your coverage to offer much more expansive benefits. Liability endorsements to consider include:
- Personal Injury Coverage: Someone might claim that you caused them reputational or financial harm through libel, slander, copyright infringement, false advertising and similar issues. Personal injury coverage can help you combat these claims as long as you did not commit these offenses intentionally.
- Errors & Omissions Coverage: Also called professional liability insurance, E&O coverage helps businesses that provide professional advice or similar services protect themselves in case they give the wrong advice. This coverage can help the insured business repay someone who claims that your mistakes have trickled down to losses for them.
- Directors & Officers Coverage: Company principals, board members and C-suite executives all make decisions that could impact the course of the business and its reputation in the eyes of the public. They need the more specific coverage offered by D&O insurance because at times, liability lawsuits could target them, personally. D&O coverage will make sure that those parties won’t face personal financial losses, if they are not complicit in any criminal wrongdoing.
- Hired/Non-Owned Auto Liability Insurance: You might not own a fleet of company vehicles. However, when you allow employee drivers to operate their own cars on behalf of the business, then the business might also be at fault if the driver causes an accident. This coverage will help you repay others impacted by your employee drivers’ mistakes.
- Cyber Liability Insurance: A cyber liability plan accounts for the fact that when you store important third-party data on computer systems, that data is vulnerable to hacks, theft, ransomware or other cybercrime. This coverage can ensure that you’ll be able to compensate clients for their exposed data and take appropriate steps to remedy the situation.
Numerous other endorsements are available, and many are industry-specific. Additionally, if you want higher levels of coverage on top of the limits of your general liability plan, then consider investing in the added benefit of commercial umbrella insurance. If a claim exceeds the limits of your standard CGL policy, then a claim on your umbrella plan will pay the remaining claim amount.
Your commercial insurance agent is dedicated to helping you with all of your business’s liability insurance needs. You can trust us to help you get the solutions you need that will remain affordable while still offering exceptional protection.
Also Read: When You Need Property Insurance Endorsements
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