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

The Three Liability Coverage Triggers in the CGL

The ISO Commercial General Liability (CGL) Coverage Form (CG 00 01) organizes its insuring agreements around three categories of harm. Knowing exactly what each covers — and what each excludes — is essential, because the exam frequently asks which coverage part responds to a given scenario.

Bodily Injury (BI)

Bodily injury means physical injury, sickness, or disease sustained by a person, including death that results. The key word is physical. Standard BI definitions in property-casualty forms do not include purely emotional or mental distress unless it accompanies a physical injury, although some courts and broadened forms extend it.

Example: A customer slips on an unmarked wet floor and breaks a wrist. The medical bills and pain-and-suffering award are bodily injury under Coverage A.

Property Damage (PD)

Property damage has two prongs:

1. Physical injury to tangible property, including resulting loss of use; and
2. Loss of use of tangible property that is not physically injured.

The phrase tangible property excludes intangible items such as data or software in the unendorsed CGL. Loss of use is important: if a contractor blocks access to a store with no physical damage, the lost business use can still be property damage.

Example: A delivery truck backs into a storefront. Repair of the wall is the first prong; the shop's lost sales while closed for repairs is loss of use (the second prong).

Personal and Advertising Injury (Coverage B)

Personal and advertising injury covers injury arising from a closed list of offenses, not from physical harm. Memorize the offenses, because they are tested directly.

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

These offenses are not bodily injury or property damage — they are reputational, privacy, and advertising harms. A common exam trap is classifying a slander claim as bodily injury; slander is personal and advertising injury under Coverage B.

Distinguishing the Three at Exam Time

Key Limit Note

In the CGL, Coverage A (BI and PD) and Coverage B (personal and advertising injury) share the General Aggregate Limit, but personal and advertising injury also has its own per-person/per-organization sublimit. The Each Occurrence Limit caps any single BI/PD loss, while the Personal and Advertising Injury Limit caps all such offenses against any one person or organization.

Exam Traps

• Emotional distress alone is generally not bodily injury in the unendorsed form.
• Loss of use without physical damage still qualifies as property damage.
• Defamation, false arrest, and advertising offenses are Coverage B items — never categorize them as BI.

How the Definitions Drive Exclusions

Because each category has a precise definition, many CGL exclusions operate by carving out part of a definition. For example, the CGL excludes "your product" and "your work" damage to the insured's own completed work under certain conditions, because the policy insures liability for harm to others, not the insured's faulty workmanship. Understanding the BI/PD definitions makes these exclusions logical rather than arbitrary.

Loss of Use and Resulting Damage

Property damage includes resulting loss of use, which can dwarf the physical repair cost. If a faulty valve floods a tenant's warehouse, the PD includes both the water-damaged inventory (physical injury to tangible property) and the business downtime while the space is restored (loss of use). Exam questions often hinge on recognizing that loss of use is part of PD, not a separate uncovered item.

Personal vs. Advertising Injury Split

Although grouped together, the offenses split into two ideas. Personal injury offenses (false arrest, malicious prosecution, wrongful eviction, defamation, privacy violations) can arise in ordinary operations. Advertising injury offenses (copying a slogan, infringing trade dress, misappropriating an advertising idea) arise only in the insured's advertisement. A defamation claim that does not appear in an ad is personal injury; the identical statement published in a paid ad implicates advertising injury.

Putting the Limits Together

Tie the categories to the CGL limit structure one more time. A single slip-and-fall is capped by the Each Occurrence Limit; all BI and PD for the policy term feed the General Aggregate Limit (products-completed operations losses feed a separate aggregate). Personal and advertising injury claims are capped per person or organization and also erode the General Aggregate. Recognizing which limit a loss touches — occurrence, general aggregate, products aggregate, or personal/advertising — is a frequent and high-value exam question.