Masonry Magazine March 1967 Page. 8
Insurance For Contractors
(Continued from page 7)
of legal representation and defense. The usual premium charge is 15% to 25% of the Products Liability premium otherwise developed, less than would be charged under a separate policy issued to the vendor.
H-Professional Liability
Anyone employing a physician or nurse is open to claims alleging professional malpractice. Coverage may be provided by endorsement or separate policy, the premium charge being dependent upon the number of such persons employed and the facilities available for treatment of injured employees. Recommended where such exposure is present. (See separate discussion of Architects' and Engineers' Professional Liability.)
I-Individual as Named Insured;
Partnership as Named Insured
An endorsement is available for a nominal additional premium to pick up non-business exposures otherwise excluded if the named insured is an individual or co-partnership. It provides the same degree of Comprehensive Personal Liability Insurance available under that policy form, but is uncommon now because the exposure is included in package fire policies, particularly Homeowners and Tenants' forms.
THE CASE FOR UNIFORM
HOLD-HARMLESS AGREEMENTS
Matters would be very simple if Hold-Harmless Clauses neatly fell into one of the three slots discussed, limited, intermediate or broad, in actual practice, but they don't at all. There is often a major difference of opinion about what they really say.
As a consequence, nobody can be quite certain that a given clause will have the desired result until it has stood the test in court; even then, there is no particular assurance that the next case will be ruled the same way.
With so many individual authors active in preparing clauses for their clients, uniformity is completely absent, although there is a lot of copying back and forth. Onc of our pet examples includes NINE separate, but very similar, indemnifying clauses in a single contract of no particular size. The poor fellow was obviously hoping that ONE of them might work if he put in enough.
Length is no criteria either; a single sentence or two buried deep in the contract specifications is often more deadly to the unwary signator than an imposing list of demands transferring liability from one party to another.
So long as there is no uniformity, those responsible for protecting the owner, architect, engineer or contractor must select and prepare new indemnification clauses, which must eventually be submitted to lawyers and insurance people for interpretation, coverage and premium determination, without assurance that the courts will treat them as intended. All of this is woe- (Continued on page 39)