Introduction to Public and Products Liability Insurance
This insurance policy provides cover when people are blaming you for causing them personal injury or property damage, whilst carrying out your business. They may be demanding compensation for the loss or injury they have suffered, and threatening to take legal action against you.
At GSI Direct, we will cover:
- the legal costs and other expenses involved sorting out the claim made against you;
- these legal costs will include the advice as to whether you have done anything wrong;
- whether you should defend or settle the claim;
- the costs of actually defending the claim in court if it reaches this stage;
- any amounts of compensation that you pay;
- it will pay for any amount that you, your insurers and lawyers offer as a settlement;
- any compensation, awards, damages awarded to the claimant by the courts
Examples for Public Liability and Products Liability
There are two main risks that a company faces that are covered by the policy:
Public Liability covers you for your direct actions that cause property damage or personal injury.. Some examples may include:
- Damaging the property you rent such as burning it down causing significant damage.
- Visiting a client’s premises and managing to cause damage..
- An IT consultant working at a client’s premises and spills coffee over their server destroying part of the hardware.
Products Liability covers an insured entity for property damage or personal injury that their products might cause to third parties. Some examples may include:
- An IT hardware product overheats and causes physical damage to another part of the server.
- A part for a machine stops working and causes damage to the rest of the machine.
Personal Injury and ACC
In other countries a general liability is usually more expensive because the risk of causing personal injury to someone is greater without the cover provided by ACC. ACC covers most personal injury in New Zealand but there are some instances where it does not provide cover such as mental injury not as a consequence of physical injury.
Disclaimers: There are other factors and policy exclusions that may influence whether a claim is covered by a policy or not. Policy coverage will solely be determined by the policy documents and policy wording, and no reliance can be placed on the content of this blog post whatsoever. The content and examples of this blog post are only given to provide a general understanding or to help explain a specific concept.
