Posts Tagged: general liability insurance

What is General Liability Insurance?

General liability is the name of one of the insurances available for your business. It is important to have one because it covers property damage, bodily injury and other claims such as advertising, protecting your budget. If you do not purchase this type of coverage, you will have to pay the costs of the claims with money from your pocket, with personal assets and even with your own business.

Nowadays, the number of business lawsuits increases every day, so you should consider protecting yourself with general liability insurance even if it is not required by law.

What costs are covered by this insurance?

  • Bodily injury (people injured on your business property that make a claim against your business for their accident).
  • Third party property damage (another property is damaged accidentally by the activity carried by your employees)
  • Advertising injury (your advertising practices may be infringing on other business, because of copyright issues)
  • Reputation Harm (other businesses may consider that you attacked their reputation if you publicly talk about them in unflattering ways) and they can make a claim of libel and slander against you.

With general liability insurance you can cover costs for legal teams to represent you, evidence costs, witness fees, as well as judgments or settlements.

 What is not covered?

This type of insurance does not cover work accidents, occupational diseases, or damage to your business property. For such incidents, you must have workers’ comp and commercial property insurance.

General Liability Insurance is not required by law, but unless you are financially prepared to survive large liability claims, you should purchase it. According to statistics, 25% of small businesses will experience a claim in the next decade and liability claims are the most common. They are also very expensive; for example, Reputation harm claim costs $50,000 on average.

If you are still in doubt about purchasing general liability insurance for your business, here is another good reason to do it: some companies (large companies mostly) may refuse to work with you if you do not carry insurance. That`s because they realize that a liability claim against you may get you out of business if you are not insured, and they prefer having this guarantee that you are able to complete your work.

On the other hand, you should also know that this type of warranty will not protect you if you act irresponsibly, you are professionally negligent, or you mix your business expenses with personal expenses.

general liability insurance

General liability insurance is not the same thing with Professional liability insurance

Many people make this confusion, but these two types of insurance are different. We already detailed the concept of general liability insurance; professional liability, on the other hand, covers the costs related to committing errors in the provided services and products, failure to uphold contractor duties, performing incomplete work, making mistakes and omissions, misrepresentation, inaccurate advice as well as violation of good faith. It is also known as Malpractice insurance and is more specific than general liability insurance.