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

The Four Injury Categories of the CGL

The ISO CGL (CG 00 01) organizes liability coverage by the type of harm. Knowing the defined terms is heavily tested:

• 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, not liability)

Each defined term has a precise policy meaning. Confusing personal injury (an offense like libel) with bodily injury (physical harm) is the single most common exam mistake in this section.

Bodily Injury and Property Damage Defined

Bodily Injury (BI) = bodily injury, sickness, or disease sustained by a person, including death that results. It is PHYSICAL harm to a human body.

Property Damage (PD) 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.

Key trap: PD covers only tangible property. Pure economic or intangible loss (lost data viewed as intangible, lost profits standing alone) is generally NOT property damage. Loss of use is covered even without physical damage — e.g., a contractor blocks a store entrance and the store loses business.

Coverage B — Personal and Advertising Injury

Coverage B responds to specific enumerated offenses, NOT physical harm. Memorize the list:

These are non-physical injuries. Because they are intentional offenses, the policy is silent on the "expected or intended" exclusion for Coverage B — coverage applies to these specific named offenses despite their intentional nature.

Worked Example — Split Limits and Per-Occurrence Caps

Liability limits are often stated as split limits, e.g., $100,000 / $300,000 / $50,000 on auto:

• $100,000 = max BI per person
• $300,000 = max BI per accident (all people)
• $50,000 = max PD per accident

If three people are injured for $80,000 each ($240,000 total): each is under the $100,000 per-person cap, and $240,000 is under the $300,000 per-accident cap, so all is paid. But if one person's BI is $150,000, the insurer pays only $100,000 for that person — the per-person limit caps it, and the insured owes the $50,000 gap personally. The CGL instead uses a single per-occurrence limit and a separate general aggregate.

Loss of Use and the "Property Damage" Definition

CGL property damage has two prongs: (1) physical injury to tangible property, including the resulting loss of use; and (2) loss of use of tangible property that is not physically injured — for example, a contractor's error idles a neighboring factory that suffered no physical harm. The second prong is frequently tested because students forget that pure loss-of-use, without physical damage, is still "property damage." Note that electronic data is generally not "tangible property" under the standard CGL, which is why cyber exposures need separate coverage.

The Coverage B Offenses

Personal and advertising injury covers a closed list of offenses, not general negligence: false arrest/detention, malicious prosecution, wrongful eviction, libel/slander/disparagement, violation of privacy, use of another's advertising idea, and infringement of copyright, trade dress, or slogan in the insured's advertisement. Patent and trademark infringement are excluded — a classic distractor.

Worked Limit Interaction

A single occurrence causes $400,000 bodily injury and a Coverage B disparagement claim of $200,000 under a CGL with a $300,000 per-occurrence, $600,000 general aggregate, and $300,000 personal-and-advertising-injury limit.

Coverage B has its own limit that does not share with the per-occurrence BI/PD limit but does erode the general aggregate, illustrating how the limit structure layers.

Classifying the Injury Correctly

Because the CGL limits interact with the type of injury, the first task on any general-liability stem is to classify the harm. Bodily injury and property damage, including loss of use of tangible property, draw on the each-occurrence and general-aggregate limits, while personal and advertising injury draws on its own separate limit yet still erodes the general aggregate. Loss of use without physical damage still counts as property damage, and electronic data is generally not tangible property, so a data exposure falls outside the standard CGL and points to a cyber policy instead.

Coverage B responds only to the closed list of offenses, so an ordinary negligence claim cannot be shoehorned into it, and patent or trademark infringement is excluded while copyright, trade dress, and slogan infringement in the insured's advertisement are covered. Getting the classification right tells you which limit applies and whether the claim belongs to the CGL at all.