Commercial General Liability
Commercial general liability
The CGL is an occurrence-based or claims-made liability policy with three coverage parts: A bodily injury and property damage liability, B personal and advertising injury liability, and C medical payments. Coverage A pays sums the insured becomes legally obligated to pay because of bodily injury or property damage to which the insurance applies, and the insurer has the right and duty to defend. Supplementary payments, such as defense costs, bail bonds, and loss of earnings, are generally paid in addition to the limits on occurrence forms.
Limits: general aggregate, products-completed operations aggregate, each occurrence, personal and advertising injury, damage to premises rented to you, and medical expense. The general aggregate is the most the insurer pays in the policy period for covered occurrences other than products-completed operations; the each-occurrence limit caps a single accident.
Key exclusions: expected or intended injury, contractual liability, liquor liability, workers compensation and employer's liability, pollution, aircraft, auto, watercraft, mobile equipment, damage to your product, damage to your work, impaired property, recall, professional liability, and damage to property in your care. Important exceptions restore coverage for damage to your work arising out of a subcontractor's work and for the cost of repairing other property damaged by your work.
Concepts: insured contract, additional insured, primary and noncontributory wording, your work and your product, and the split between premises-operations and products-completed operations.
Traps: assuming defense costs erode limits; misapplying the aggregate across policy years; treating the your-work exclusion as absolute.
Rule of thumb: trigger first (occurrence or claims-made), then the coverage part, then the exclusion, then the limit.
Worked example: Each occurrence is $1M and the general aggregate is $2M. Three separate covered occurrences in one policy year pay $1M, $1M, and $0, because the aggregate is exhausted after two.