Coverage lines
Nine lines, zero jargon.
Every line below gets the same honest treatment: what it covers, when you actually need it, where the common gaps hide, and who it's for. If a line doesn't fit your business, we'll say so — clarity includes "you don't need this."
What it covers
- Third-party bodily injury on your premises or from your operations
- Damage you cause to others' property
- Products & completed operations claims
- Personal & advertising injury (libel, slander)
When you need it
- Day one — it's the foundation of a commercial program
- Required by most leases, contracts, and job specs
Common gaps
- Professional-services exclusions (that's E&O's job)
- Limits below what your contracts require
- Subcontractor and additional-insured wording mismatches
Who it's for
- Effectively every operating business
- Especially anything with premises, customers, or jobsites
What it covers
- Medical costs for employees injured at work
- Lost-wage replacement during recovery
- Employer's liability for related suits
When you need it
- Required for most Utah employers — usually from your first hire
- Often demanded by GCs before you set foot on site
Common gaps
- Misclassified payroll — wrong class codes quietly inflate your rate
- Uncovered 1099s who are employees in everything but name
- Out-of-state work without the right state coverage
Who it's for
- Any business with employees
- Your experience mod is manageable — not a fixed fate
What it covers
- Liability when company vehicles injure people or damage property
- Physical damage to your owned fleet
- Hired & non-owned auto exposure
When you need it
- Any titled vehicle in the business's name
- Employees driving anywhere on company business — even personal cars
Common gaps
- No hired & non-owned coverage while staff run errands in their own cars
- Tools and materials in transit (that's inland marine territory)
- New vehicles never added to the schedule
Who it's for
- Fleets of one to one hundred
- Contractors, energy, field-service businesses especially
What it covers
- Extra limits stacked above GL, auto, and employer's liability
- The catastrophic claim your primary limits can't absorb
When you need it
- When a single bad day could exceed $1M — fleets, jobsites, public exposure
- When contracts demand higher limits than your primaries carry
Common gaps
- Underlying limits that don't match the umbrella's requirements — a gap, not a stack
- Lines the umbrella doesn't sit over (it rarely covers everything)
Who it's for
- Often the least expensive additional millions available
- Anyone whose worst-case scenario is bigger than their primary limits
What it covers
- The structure while it's under construction
- Materials on site, in transit, and in temporary storage
- Often: debris removal after a covered loss
When you need it
- Ground-up builds and major renovations
- Before materials hit the site — not after
Common gaps
- Soft costs and delay-in-completion left off the form
- Policy expiring before the project actually finishes
- Occupancy clauses voiding coverage when a building is partially occupied
Who it's for
- GCs, developers, and project owners
- Whoever the contract says must carry it — check before you sign
What it is
- Surety bonds: bid, performance, and payment
- A financial guarantee to the project owner — not insurance for you
- If the surety pays, you reimburse the surety
When you need it
- Public work — almost always bonded
- Larger private contracts that require performance security
Worth knowing
- Bonding capacity is built over time on financials and track record
- Clean, reviewed financial statements expand what you can bid
- Personal indemnity is standard — understand it before signing
Who it's for
- Contractors bidding bonded work
- Firms that want capacity ready before the big bid appears
What it covers
- Breach response: forensics, notification, credit monitoring
- Ransomware and cyber extortion
- Business interruption from a cyber event
- Liability when customer or employee data is compromised
When you need it
- You store data, take payments, or depend on systems to operate
- Increasingly required by customer and vendor contracts
Common gaps
- Social-engineering / funds-transfer fraud buried under tiny sublimits
- MFA and control requirements that void coverage if unmet
- Dependent business interruption — your vendor's outage, your loss
Who it's for
- Nearly everyone now
- Technology and professional firms most acutely
What it covers
- Claims of wrongful termination, discrimination, harassment, retaliation
- Defense costs — often the largest piece — even for meritless claims
When you need it
- From your first employee; risk grows with headcount
- Around layoffs, terminations, and fast growth
Common gaps
- Wage-and-hour claims commonly excluded or sublimited
- Third-party coverage (claims from customers or vendors) not included
- High retentions that surprise at claim time
Who it's for
- Every employer — especially without in-house HR or counsel
- HR managers who want defense behind their policies
What it covers
- Claims that your professional work or advice caused financial loss
- Defense costs for negligence allegations
- The exposure GL explicitly excludes
When you need it
- You're paid for expertise, advice, design, or services
- Client contracts increasingly require it outright
Common gaps
- Retroactive dates that orphan past work when you switch policies
- Contractual-liability assumptions beyond the policy's scope
- Letting a claims-made policy lapse without tail coverage
Who it's for
- Consultants, technology firms, design professionals
- Anyone whose mistake costs a client money rather than blood or property
Beyond the standard market
Captive & alternative risk — when it genuinely fits.
A captive lets a qualifying business own its risk financing: premiums fund your own insurance structure instead of disappearing into a carrier's pool, and disciplined loss control becomes an asset instead of a hope. It's powerful — and it is not for everyone. Anyone who pitches a captive as a universal upgrade is selling, not advising.
Signals it may fit
- Meaningful, stable premium spend across multiple lines
- Loss history consistently better than your class average
- Real investment in safety and loss control
- Leadership comfortable with longer-horizon risk financing
Signals it doesn't
- Volatile or thin premium volume
- Losses you can't yet predict or control
- Needing every dollar liquid in the short term