I have had a claim. Can I still get liquor liability?

What this means for you

• FOUR THINGS, FOR EVERY CLAIM. What happened. What it finally cost, as against what was first reserved. Whether it is closed. And what changed afterwards. The last one carries more weight than the other three combined, because it is the only one that says anything about next year.
• OPEN CLAIMS WITH LARGE RESERVES ARE THE REAL OBSTACLE. A reserve is an estimate, it is frequently set high early, and it follows you into every submission until it is settled. Chasing your current carrier to close or reduce a stale reserve before you go to market is often worth more than anything else you could do.
• ASSAULT CLAIMS AND DRIVING CLAIMS ARE READ DIFFERENTLY. An assault claim says something about your door, your crowd and your policies — all of which you control and can demonstrably change. A dram shop claim says something about service practice. Both are answerable; they are answered with different evidence.
• A NON-RENEWAL IS A QUESTION, NOT A VERDICT. It stops automated quoting entirely and it is not a barrier to a human underwriter, provided it is disclosed and explained. Discovering it later is the version that costs coverage.
• DO NOT SHOP IT QUIETLY. Loss runs are pulled and checked. A submission that says the record is clean and is contradicted by the report has lost the account on credibility rather than on the claim — and credibility is most of what a hard-class submission is made of.
• THE THREE-YEAR CLOCK IS REAL. Claims age out of the window that matters most, so a venue one year past a bad loss and a venue three years past it are in genuinely different positions. If you are close to the line, timing your remarketing is worth thinking about.

Related questions

How long does one bad claim follow me?

Loss runs are usually requested for three to five years, and the recent end weighs most. A serious claim four years back with nothing since is close to background noise; the same claim eight months ago is the centre of the submission. What shortens the effective memory is a documented change in operations dated shortly after the loss — it converts the claim from a prediction into a history.

Should I just pay small claims myself to keep the record clean?

Talk to us before you decide, because it depends on the wording and on the size. Not reporting an incident that later develops into something larger can prejudice the coverage you were relying on, and in this class incidents do develop — an assault that looked minor at the time becomes a claim two years later. There is a real difference between choosing not to claim on a known, closed, minor loss and failing to notify an incident that is still capable of growing.

Why disclosure beats tidiness

So can you actually place a venue like mine?

Usually, yes — and the ones we cannot place quickly are almost always the ones where the submission arrived as a declarations page and a renewal date. This class is placed on operating detail: the floor plan, the hours you actually keep as opposed to the ones your licence permits, the revenue split, the training records, the written policies, and an explanation attached to every claim. Venues that look identical on an application place very differently once that detail is in front of an underwriter who writes the class.

The full underwriting list, in order

Need this handled?

We do the filings, and we place the accounts other brokers decline — lapsed authority, claims history, new ventures. Tell us the situation and a licensed human replies the same business day.

Written by the licensed brokers at Boring Insurance. Last updated 2026-08-22. See all guides.