Products liability focuses on injury or damage, while recall coverage may address specified withdrawal and replacement costs.
Casualty and Excess
Products Liability.
The product is the exposure. The supply chain tells us who owns the failure.
Products liability can respond to covered bodily injury or property damage caused by a product. Product recall, contamination, impaired property, errors and omissions, and financial loss may require separate coverage. Design, manufacture, import, labeling, distribution, end use, contracts, territory, and loss history drive the placement.
Placement context
Facts to confirm before applying.
Send the actual product list. Consumer goods can mean a cotton tote bag or a lithium battery sold for infant use. Underwriters need to know what fails, how it fails, who can be hurt, who designed it, who made it, who imports it, and how the insured can trace and retrieve it.
Coverage scope
What the coverage may address.
Vendor, importer, private-label, component-part, and contract roles affect who is sued and who owes indemnity.
Discontinued products, prior sales, foreign distribution, and long-tail injury can outlive the current policy term.
Account preparation
Show the product’s path from manufacture to end use
The company selling a product may use a contract manufacturer and a distributor. Describe each party’s work, contracts and territory instead of assuming that domestic invoicing means domestic exposure only.
Prepare the first file
- Identify the product, intended users and uses, labels, instructions, warnings, claims made in marketing, and applicable regulatory documentation.
- Map design, manufacture, testing, labeling, sale and distribution, including contract manufacturers and downstream countries of use.
- Reconcile current and projected receipts, product changes, quality controls, batch traceability, recall procedures, contracts and additional insured requests.
- Provide prior policy dates and declarations, currently valued loss records, and a factual explanation of a lapse. Identify any requested continuity or prior-acts treatment.
Review the resulting terms
- Confirm whether terms are occurrence or claims-made, the retroactive date, reporting conditions, coverage territory and suit jurisdiction.
- Separate products liability from product recall expense, reimbursement sublimits and other extensions. Compare the actual form and endorsements.
- Track pre-bind and post-bind requirements separately. A binder with outstanding conditions is not evidence that every requirement has been satisfied.
Confirm the account-specific position
Product and medical-device risks require account-specific review. New coverage does not automatically repair an earlier uninsured period or preserve a prior retroactive date.
Reviewed 2026-09-09 by Hedge Specialty.
Placement factors
Facts that affect placement.
- Higher-hazard, imported, component, ingestible, medical, or safety-critical products
- New products, startups, foreign manufacturing, or difficult distribution chains
- Large retailers, contractual indemnity, vendor requirements, or recall exposure
- Adverse claims, discontinued products, or long-tail completed-operations risk
Coverage and access are separate questions
Coverage guidance does not confirm a current market route, quote, policy terms, or bind authority for a particular account.
Submission preparation
Prepare a consistent underwriting file.
Account narrative
Start with the worst credible product failure, then show the supply chain, controls, sales footprint, contract allocation, recall capability, and coverage needed for that failure.
Include these facts
- Product schedule, end uses, sales, territories, and distribution channels
- Design, manufacturing, supplier, testing, warning, and quality-control information
- Contracts, indemnification, additional-insured requirements, and recall plans
- Currently valued losses, incidents, complaints, and discontinued-product history
Resolve these questions before market review
- What can the product do if it fails or is misused?
- Who designs, manufactures, imports, labels, and distributes it?
- What testing, traceability, warning, and recall controls exist?
- Which contracts, territories, and prior products extend the exposure?
Submission errors
Avoid these three issues.
- One revenue number with no product or territory split
- Calling the insured a distributor when it imports, private-labels, designs, or modifies the product
- Asking for recall coverage without a recall plan, traceability process, or expected cost model
Hedge resources
Forms and class guidance.
Hedge forms
Review the form and download a fillable PDF.
Products Liability Supplemental
A fillable Hedge supplemental for product manufacturers, importers, distributors, and sellers.
Manufacturing Supplemental
A fillable Hedge supplemental for manufacturing operations and related product exposures.
Loss and Claims Supplement
A fillable Hedge supplement for organizing prior losses, claims, and open-claim detail for wholesale review.
Class guidance
Public, directional appetite to help prepare for account-specific review.
Related coverage
Review related exposures.
Casualty and Excess
Commercial General Liability
The class code gets the file opened. The operations narrative gets it quoted.
Open coverageCasualty and Excess
Commercial Umbrella and Excess Liability
More limit is not the same as more coverage.
Open coverageProperty and Package
Commercial Property
A property file is a story about what can burn, break, blow away, or stop the business.
Open coverageHedge review
Send the account for review.
You do not need a perfect packet to start. Send the account, requested line, effective date, current applications, available loss information, and the fact making the placement difficult. Hedge will separate missing information from market-ready information before any account-specific route is confirmed.