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

The three coverages of the CGL

The ISO Commercial General Liability form CG 00 01 organizes its insuring agreements into three lettered coverages, each tied to a defined injury type.

Know which coverage a fact pattern triggers. A slander lawsuit is Coverage B, a customer's broken arm is Coverage A, and a minor cut treated without a lawsuit can be paid under Coverage C without proving the insured was at fault.

Bodily injury and property damage defined

Bodily injury (BI) means physical bodily injury, sickness, or disease, including death that results. Purely emotional harm without physical injury often falls outside the BI definition (and may instead be a Coverage B offense).

Property damage (PD) has two prongs:

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

The second prong is a classic trap. Example: a contractor blocks access to a store for a week without touching the building. There is loss of use of undamaged tangible property, which is property damage even though nothing was physically broken. Electronic data is generally not tangible property under the CGL.

Personal and advertising injury offenses

Coverage B — personal and advertising injury covers a defined list of offenses, not physical injury:

• False arrest, detention, or imprisonment
• Malicious prosecution
• Wrongful eviction or wrongful entry / invasion of right of private occupancy
• Oral or written publication that slanders or libels a person or organization
• Oral or written publication that violates a person's right of privacy
• Use of another's advertising idea; infringing another's copyright, trade dress, or slogan in your advertisement

Trap: assault and battery causing a broken nose is bodily injury (Coverage A), while a defamatory statement is personal injury (Coverage B). The same incident can implicate both coverages.

CGL limit structure with numbers

A typical CGL declares: General Aggregate 2,000,000; Products-Completed Operations Aggregate 2,000,000; Each Occurrence 1,000,000; Personal and Advertising Injury 1,000,000; Damage to Premises Rented to You 100,000; Medical Payments 5,000.

Worked example: three separate occurrences each pay 900,000. The Each Occurrence limit (1,000,000) is not breached by any single loss, but the three total 2,700,000 against a 2,000,000 General Aggregate, so the insurer pays only 2,000,000 and the insured absorbs the remaining 700,000.

Auto split limits

Liability on auto policies is often stated as split limits such as 100/300/50 (in thousands):

• 100 — bodily injury maximum per person
• 300 — bodily injury maximum per accident (all people combined)
• 50 — property damage maximum per accident

Worked example: an at-fault insured injures four people with provable BI of 120,000; 90,000; 60,000; and 40,000, and causes 70,000 in property damage. Each person is capped at 100,000, so the BI offers start at 100,000 + 90,000 + 60,000 + 40,000 = 290,000, which is under the 300,000 per-accident cap, so BI pays 290,000. Property damage is capped at 50,000 (not 70,000), leaving the insured exposed for 20,000. Contrast a Combined Single Limit (CSL) of 300,000, which would pay any mix of BI and PD up to one shared 300,000 cap.

The Three CGL Injury Definitions

The CGL splits the harm it insures into three defined buckets, each triggered differently:

Property damage is broader than it looks: it includes both physical injury to tangible property and loss of use of tangible property that is not physically damaged - so a contractor who blocks access to a store with no physical harm can still trigger property-damage loss-of-use coverage.

Personal and Advertising Injury Offenses

Coverage B does not require bodily injury or an occurrence; it responds to a closed list of offenses:

• False arrest, detention, or imprisonment
• Malicious prosecution
• Wrongful eviction or wrongful entry / invasion of privacy of a room or premises
• Oral or written publication that libels or slanders a person or organization
• Oral or written publication that violates a person's right of privacy
• The use of another's advertising idea in your advertisement
• Infringing on another's copyright, trade dress, or slogan in your advertisement

These map to the intentional-tort family that Coverage A excludes, which is why Coverage B fills the personal-injury gap. The Coverage B limit and the General Aggregate both apply, so a large defamation claim erodes the aggregate available for bodily-injury claims.