Some of the policies that I have seen over the past couple of years seem to not provide any coverage or very limited coverage to the businesses that they insure.
Some of the companies and policies that I have had to opportunity to work on have either no current insurance coverage or have a premises liability policy. The premise liability policy only gives coverage to the business’s office operations and not the production, distribution, or VOD operations. The easiest way to tell what kind of policy that you have is to open your current policy and see if your policy is rated on square footage or on production cost/sales.
If it is rated on square footage, your company only has coverage for your office exposure and not for your production, product or anything else outside of your office activities like the UPS guy dropping of packages or office meetings with outside vendors coming in. If your business is rated on sales or production cost more than likely you have a true general liability policy, but you still may have gaps to properly protect your company.
With everyone suing everyone, some companies still operate without insurance all together!
Some of these companies I have talked to have told me that they’ll only shoot in a private home or some other locations and they don’t require me to have insurance on the location.
If you shoot at locations that you don’t own and don’t have an insurance policy that gives you coverage for rented or nonowned property then you are essentially self insuring the location and all of its contents if your activity causes a loss of any kind.
The homeowners or the property owners insurance only covers the location for its intended use.
The insurance company may pay the claim, but they will subrograte or turn around and go after your insurance policy or your company personally for the loss that it paid out to rebuild or replace the homeowner/property owner for their loss.
Johnathan G. Woolworth is a licensed agent at Nicholson & Associates Insurance. He can be reached at (360) 254-2842, ext. 21, or by ICQ at 567157496.
