General Liability, the BOP, and the Home Office

Commercial General Liability (CGL) insurance covers what the business does to strangers: the client who trips over a cable in your office, the contractor’s ladder that goes through a customer’s skylight, and the “personal and advertising injury” tail — defamation, disparagement, and copyright infringement in your own advertising. It is written on an occurrence basis with defense paid on top of the limit, and $1M per occurrence with a $2M aggregate is the form clients ask for. For office-bound work it is cheap because the exposure is small. The price climbs when you work on client premises, ship a physical product, or put on events.

The home-office gap. The standard homeowner’s form limits property used primarily for a business to $3,000 on the premises and $1,500 away from them under ISO’s 2022 edition (older forms still in circulation cap the premises figure at $2,500), so most of the $6,000 of camera gear stolen from your car on the way to a shoot is yours to replace. The liability section is worse. The form’s definition of business includes any trade, profession, or occupation, full-time, part-time, or occasional, at any income; the small-activity carve-out — no insured earning more than $5,000 from it in the prior twelve months on the 2022 form, $2,000 on older ones — applies only to activities that are not your profession. The client who slips on your front steps on the way to a meeting in your home office is a business visitor, and the carrier will ask why they were there. If you see no one at home and own modest equipment, add a home-business endorsement to the homeowner’s policy. Once clients visit, inventory sits in the garage, or the equipment is worth real money, buy a Business Owner’s Policy (BOP): a package of general liability, business personal property, and business-income coverage priced for small firms. A BOP never includes professional liability, workers’ compensation, or commercial auto, and it includes cyber only by endorsement; those remain separate purchases.

Certificates and additional insureds. Client contracts routinely require you to name the client as an additional insured on your general-liability policy, with a waiver of subrogation and “primary and non-contributory” wording. The certificate of insurance you email them proves none of that. The standard ACORD 25 certificate says, in capitals, that it “is issued as a matter of information only and confers no rights upon the certificate holder,” and that an additional insured needs the policy itself to be endorsed. Ask the broker for blanket additional-insured and waiver-of-subrogation endorsements, which extend automatically to anyone a written contract requires you to add. They cost little, and they keep you from breaching a contract the day you forget to request a client-specific endorsement.