Coverage
General Liability
Third-party bodily injury and property damage protection.
Covers slip-and-falls, damaged client property, and other everyday accidents that happen on the job — including at client sites and events.
What's included
- $1M / $2M standard limits
- Additional insureds included
- Same-day certificate of insurance
Who needs it
Any pro who works at client sites, events, or shared spaces.
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What general liability covers for professional firms
General liability is the bodily-injury and property-damage policy — the coverage that responds when a client trips over your laptop bag, when your employee damages a client’s conference room, or when “advertising injury” claims (limited defamation/IP perils) arise from your marketing. For office-based professionals the premises exposure is modest, which is why GL for professional firms is inexpensive — but it’s the certificate everyone asks for: landlords require it to sign a lease, venues require it for events, and client vendor portals want it alongside your E&O.
GL and E&O are complements, not substitutes: GL explicitly excludes professional services, and E&O excludes bodily injury and property damage. A complete professional program carries both — often with GL wrapped into a business owners policy that adds property coverage for your equipment at a package price.
Certificates, additional insureds, and the paperwork layer
Most GL activity for professionals is administrative: producing certificates of insurance, adding landlords/clients/venues as additional insureds, and meeting wording requirements (“primary and non-contributory,” waiver of subrogation) that appear in leases and MSAs. These endorsements are routine but not automatic — build lead time into contract signings, and send certificate requests to your agent rather than promising wording you haven’t confirmed. Our certificate request page handles these same-day for our clients.
Frequently asked questions
Do home-based professionals need general liability?
If clients ever visit, if you work at client sites, or if any contract or lease asks for a certificate — yes. Homeowners policies exclude business liability, so the home-office professional relying on one is effectively bare. A basic GL or BOP for an office professional is among the cheapest policies in commercial insurance.
What limits are standard?
$1M per occurrence / $2M aggregate is the near-universal request in leases and vendor agreements. Higher requirements are usually satisfied with an umbrella policy layered above rather than raising the GL itself.
Does GL cover my work product or advice?
No — professional services are excluded, which is the entire reason E&O exists. The pair is designed to interlock: GL for the physical world, E&O for the professional one. Claims that blend both (common in construction-adjacent work) are why the two policies should be placed with coordination.
What is “advertising injury” coverage?
A GL component covering certain offenses in your advertising — limited defamation, privacy, and IP perils. It’s narrower than it sounds and excludes most content businesses’ real exposures; media and marketing professionals need actual media liability rather than relying on it.
Package it: business owners policy · add umbrella limits · get quotes.