8.4 Bodily Injury, Property Damage, and Personal/Advertising Injury

The Three Liability Coverage Categories

The ISO CGL (CG 00 01) splits liability into named insuring agreements, each with its own definition and limit:

• Coverage A — Bodily Injury (BI) and Property Damage (PD) liability.
• Coverage B — Personal and Advertising Injury liability.
• Coverage C — Medical Payments (no-fault, small limit).

The exam wants you to match a loss to the right coverage and the right limit. Each defined term has a precise meaning — memorize the definitions, because exam distractors swap them.

Bodily Injury and Property Damage Defined

Bodily Injury (BI): bodily injury, sickness, or disease sustained by a person, including death resulting from any of these. Note it requires physical harm — purely emotional distress without physical injury often falls outside the BI definition (a tested distinction).

Property Damage (PD): (1) physical injury to tangible property, including resulting loss of use; and (2) loss of use of tangible property that is not physically injured. Trap: the CGL says electronic data is not tangible property — so corrupted data alone is not PD under the unendorsed form.

Coverage A excludes expected or intended injury, contractual liability (except insured contracts), and damage to the insured's own product/work (the business-risk exclusions).

Personal and Advertising Injury (Coverage B)

Personal and Advertising Injury covers specific offenses, not accidents:

• False arrest, detention, or imprisonment
• Malicious prosecution
• Wrongful eviction / wrongful entry / invasion of privacy of a room or premises
• Libel and slander (oral or written defamation)
• Oral/written publication that violates a person's right of privacy
• Use of another's advertising idea / infringing copyright, trade dress, or slogan in your advertisement

Trap: Coverage B is triggered by an offense, not by an "occurrence," and it has its own aggregate-sharing under the general aggregate. Patent and trademark infringement are excluded (only copyright, trade dress, and slogan in 'your advertisement' are covered).

CGL Limits and a Worked Aggregate Example

The CGL declarations show six limits. How they interact is heavily tested:

Worked example: Limits are $1,000,000 Each Occurrence / $2,000,000 General Aggregate. Three unrelated non-products claims hit for $800,000, $700,000, and $900,000. The first two pay in full ($1.5M). The general aggregate has $500,000 left, so the third $900,000 claim pays only $500,000 — even though each is under the $1M occurrence limit. The insured retains the remaining $400,000.

Loss of Use and the Property Damage Definition

Property damage means physical injury to tangible property, including loss of use of that property, and loss of use of tangible property that is not physically injured. The second prong matters: if a contractor's error makes a client's undamaged warehouse unusable for a week, the lost use is property damage even though nothing was physically harmed. The exam tests whether intangible items — data, software, money — qualify; under the standard CGL, electronic data is not tangible property, so corrupted data alone is not property damage absent an endorsement.

The Seven Personal and Advertising Injury Offenses

Coverage B reaches enumerated offenses, not accidents: (1) false arrest/detention/imprisonment; (2) malicious prosecution; (3) wrongful eviction or invasion of private occupancy; (4) slander/libel (oral or written defamation); (5) violation of privacy; (6) misappropriation of advertising ideas or style; and (7) copyright/trade dress/slogan infringement in the insured's advertisement. Trademark and patent infringement are not covered offenses — a frequent trap. Knowing-falsehood, prior publication, and the insured's own breach of contract are excluded under Coverage B.

How BI, PD, and PAI Map to CGL Coverages

The three injury categories drive which CGL coverage responds: bodily injury and property damage fall under Coverage A (occurrence-based, subject to the Each Occurrence and General Aggregate limits); personal and advertising injury falls under Coverage B (offense-based, sharing the Personal & Advertising Injury limit and General Aggregate); medical expenses without regard to fault fall under Coverage C. Matching the harm to the correct coverage and limit is the core skill the exam tests across the CGL chapters.

Worked Aggregate Example

A bakery's CGL carries a $1,000,000 Each Occurrence limit and a $2,000,000 General Aggregate. Three unrelated covered occurrences during the year cause judgments of $700,000, $900,000, and $800,000. Each is within the per-occurrence cap, so the insurer pays $700,000 and $900,000 in full ($1,600,000), leaving only $400,000 of the General Aggregate for the third loss — the insured absorbs the remaining $400,000. This illustrates why higher aggregates matter for businesses with frequent claims: the per-occurrence limit is intact, but the annual bucket runs dry.

Care, Custody, or Control and Mobile-Equipment Nuances

The CGL excludes damage to property in the insured's care, custody, or control and to 'your work' and 'your product' — these belong in inland marine, installation, or warranty coverage instead. Bodily injury must arise from an occurrence (an accident, including continuous exposure to harmful conditions) that was neither expected nor intended from the insured's standpoint. Knowing these boundaries lets you reject answer choices that try to pull faulty-workmanship repair costs or intentional acts into the BI/PD coverage grant.