General Liability vs. Professional Liability Insurance | Insureon (2024)

FAQs

General Liability vs. Professional Liability Insurance | Insureon? ›

General liability can cover physical accidents — injuries to people who are not your employees and damage to property that doesn't belong to you. Professional liability can cover professional accidents and mistakes. Both types of insurance can provide financial help for lawsuits.

Depending on your business, you may hear the term errors and omissions insurance for professional liability. However, there is no difference in these coverages.

Professional liability insurance can help protect your business if someone sues you for making a mistake in your professional services. This policy is also known as E&O coverage and professional indemnity insurance.

Any business that sells its expertise should consider professional liability insurance. Also known as errors and omissions (E&O) insurance, this coverage protects your company and your bottom line from customer claims of late, incomplete, or unsatisfactory work. Accusations like these can lead to costly lawsuits.

The coverage is the same, but the name may depend on the type of business that the coverage is for. For architects and consultants, this policy is called professional liability. In the real estate and IT sectors, it's errors and omissions. And, for medical and legal professions, it's known as malpractice insurance.

The two types of professional liability insurance are claims-made and occurrence. Claims-made means the policy must have been active when the event and lawsuit happened, and occurrence means that the policy covers any qualified claim resulting from an incident while the policy was active.

They offer different scopes of protection.

General liability lives up to its name – it's generalized liability coverage for lawsuits, property damage, and advertising injuries. E&O only covers lawsuits over the financial losses someone experienced because of your work.

General liability covers physical risks, such as bodily injuries and property damage. Professional liability insurance covers more abstract risks, such as errors and omissions in the services your business provides.

In order to trigger coverage under a professional liability policy, there must be an allegation that you or your business made an error or omission in the course of rendering professional services that resulted in harm to a third party.

Accountant professional liability insurance kicks in to provide protection if a client sues you for negligence or perceived mistakes you have made in your work which they believe have led to financial damage for them.

Does E&O cover negligence? ›

Errors and omissions insurance, also called E&O insurance, protects businesses against claims of mistakes, negligence, inadequate work, inaccuracies, misrepresentation or similar allegations. Your business should have E&O insurance if it provides services to customers for a fee.

A: Malpractice Insurance is a type of PL Insurance, but PL Insurance is not necessarily Malpractice Insurance. Doctors and lawyers use the term Malpractice Insurance for their industry-specific PL policy.

General Liability covers personal and bodily injury to non-employees, property damage to non-owned property, advertising injury, employee benefits liability, and professional liability (except for medical malpractice, which is covered under the Professional Medical and Hospital Liability Program).

Errors and omissions insurance (also called E&O or professional liability insurance) protects your business from claims arising from negligence, faulty advice, errors, or omissions. E&O insurance covers damages, settlements, and legal costs that result from covered claims.

Liability insurance helps cover your financial responsibility for injury to others and damage to their property. It does not cover damage to our own property or any liability related to your business or profession. The umbrella also typically does not cover exposures that the underlying policies also do not cover.

Miscellaneous Professional Liability or MPL Insurance offers protection from financial loss that a business or professional individual could incur as a result of a lawsuit. Also referred to as Errors and Omissions or Malpractice Insurance throughout some industries, these policies can help cover legal fees.

To determine your business's risk of facing a lawsuit, your E&O application will ask for details about your company's organization, revenue and payroll data, information on how your company uses contracts, potential corporate entanglements, and insurance and legal history.