Glossary

Casualty insurance is primarily concerned with the losses caused by injuries to persons and legal liability imposed on the insured for such injury or for damage to property of others.

Coincidental excess coverage refers to the insurance provided by what would otherwise be a primary policy but contains an "excess" type other insurance clause stating that, with respect to a particular set of circumstances only, the policy is providing excess coverage. In other words, the status of the insurance as excess rests on a coincidence of factual circumstances. For example, a business auto policy (BAP) may contain another insurance provision stating that it is providing excess coverage for any nonowned vehicle. For owned autos, the BAP would provide ordinary primary coverage, but for nonowned autos, the BAP would provide coincidental excess coverage.

The commercial general liability (CGL) policy is a standard insurance policy issued to business organizations to protect them against liability claims for bodily injury (BI) and property damage (PD) arising out of premises, operations, products, and completed operations; and advertising and personal injury (PI) liability. The CGL policy was introduced by Insurance Services Office, Inc. (ISO), in 1986 and replaced the "comprehensive" general liability policy.

A corridor self-insured retention (SIR), also known as a "bikini deductible," is a self-insured layer, separating the primary layer of risk—whether insured, self-insured, or funded in a captive—from the layer immediately excess of the primary. It was first used in health insurance, inserting a deductible (a real deductible, not an SIR) between a first dollar insured health plan and major medical coverage, which is excess of the primary health insurance policy. The structure resembles a bikini because there's defined protection on the bottom and on the top but nothing in the middle. Corridor SIRs migrated from health insurance to property and casualty applications when risk managers, brokers, and creative excess insurance underwriters were looking for more sophisticated methods of allocating and funding risk. Typically, the corridor SIR layer is unfunded. It's used to lower the cost of (or provide access to) excess or umbrella insurance while relieving the insured from the requirement to fund for expected losses. It is also used in structured insurance arrangements. Corridor SIRs can be designed to cover non-aggregated per occurrence limits or a combination of per occurrence and aggregate limits. A typical corridor SIR will include per occurrence limits perhaps subject to an annual aggregate, depending on the risk and the excess insurance pricing.

Cross-liability coverage is coverage in connection with a suit brought against an insured by another party that has insured status under the same policy. Cross-liability coverage is provided as an intrinsic feature of the standard commercial general liability (CGL) policy by means of the "separation of insureds" condition. Some umbrella and professional liability policies contain insured-versus-insured exclusions that eliminate cross-liability coverage.

Coordination of coverage is the process of reviewing and possibly modifying the scope or nature of coverage provided by an insured's various liability policies to eliminate gaps or overlaps. For example, if an insured has an occurrence-based commercial general liability (CGL) policy and an umbrella policy written with a claims-made trigger, coverage gaps could result. Coordinating coverage in this instance might involve replacing the umbrella policy with an occurrence form.