What is the difference between bodily injury and contingent bodily injury coverage?

Bodily injury: the general liability coverage

Bodily injury is the first half of a general liability policy. It pays when somebody is physically hurt by your premises, your operations or a product you sold, and the hurt was an accident. A customer who trips over a cable at your office, a delivery driver bitten in your parking lot, a person injured by a device you manufactured: these are bodily injury claims, and general liability is built for them.

Two words in the form do most of the work. The injury has to be caused by an occurrence, which the policy defines as an accident. And bodily injury itself means injury, sickness or disease to a person, including death. Nothing in the standard form asks whether the injury came from advice, which is why owners assume their general liability answers any injury claim at all.

Where the gap comes from

The standard form does not exclude professional services, but the policy a technology or advice business actually buys usually does. Insurers add an endorsement such as ISO’s CG 21 16, Exclusion – Designated Professional Services, or a technology services exclusion of their own, and the effect is to remove any injury that arises from the service you provide. For an app, the service is the plan, the target or the reading on screen. The exclusion lands exactly on the claim.

The professional or technology E&O policy is where the advice is supposed to be covered, and it has a clause pointing the other way. E&O forms are written for financial loss and commonly exclude bodily injury and property damage outright, on the reasoning that general liability handles physical harm. The specimen in our library excludes any claim for bodily injury and counts mental anguish and emotional distress as bodily injury, so it reaches further than a broken bone.

Put the two clauses side by side and the injury caused by an error has nowhere to go. General liability says it arose from professional services. E&O says it is bodily injury. Each policy is behaving as written, and the business pays the defense itself.

Contingent bodily injury: the grant on the E&O

Contingent bodily injury, often shortened to CBI, is coverage on the E&O policy for a physical injury that results from your product, service or advice failing, where you did not physically cause the harm yourself. The injury is contingent on somebody relying on what you provided: following the program, trusting the reading, acting on the recommendation. It is the coverage that answers when your error is the cause and somebody else’s body is the damage.

There is no standard industry form for it, so the wording varies by insurer. It usually arrives one of three ways: as an endorsement added to the technology or professional E&O, as a carve-back that says the bodily injury exclusion does not apply to injury arising from a covered error, or as a coverage built into a technology program. Most often it carries a sublimit, meaning a smaller limit that sits inside the main limit rather than adding to it.

It is offered, not automatic. Tokio Marine HCC publishes that a contingent bodily injury and property damage sublimit is available on its TechGuard tech E&O, and Corvus lists bodily injury as an additional coverage on its Smart Tech E&O. On the media side, a carrier quoting a ranch channel for us added contingent bodily injury at $250,000 inside a $1,000,000 limit when we asked. In every case it was there because someone asked for it.

Who needs contingent bodily injury

Any business whose output can change what a person does with their body. Fitness, nutrition, fasting and wellness apps are the clearest case, because the whole product is instructions. Software that runs or reads a physical device belongs here too: a wearable companion app, a smart home controller, a fleet or machinery dashboard, scheduling software for clinics. So do consultants and engineers whose recommendation is built by somebody else, and publishers of how-to content, where the same idea is called copycat injury and sits on a media policy instead.

If you also make the physical device, the hardware is a product liability question with its own policy. Contingent bodily injury is for the software, advice or service layer, and the two should be placed knowing about each other so neither carrier can point at the other.