General liability, in one sentence
GL responds to bodily injury and property damage to third parties arising from your premises, operations, and products: the client who trips over a cable in your office, the ladder through the customer’s window, the product that hurt someone. Bodies and stuff — not spreadsheets. It usually arrives bundled inside a BOP for eligible small businesses.
E&O, in one sentence
E&O responds to financial harm from your professional work or advice when nobody was hurt and nothing was physically damaged: the missed filing deadline, the bad spec, the misconfigured system that scrambled a client’s quarter. (Where the mistake is a security or data incident, E&O and cyber start to overlap — which one leads depends on the forms.)
The classic confusions
- A consultant ships a defective deliverable and the client loses money — that’s E&O, not GL. No injury, no property damage, no GL trigger — a surprise to many consultants who own only a GL policy because a landlord once required one.
- A client trips over your laptop bag during an on-site meeting — that’s GL, not E&O. The quality of your advice is irrelevant to their broken wrist.
- A contract demands "professional liability" and you send your GL certificate — the requirement isn’t satisfied. Contracts name the two policies separately because they respond to separate failures; additional-insured status, when requested, typically rides on the GL side.
Faulty workmanship: often neither
The honest paragraph contractors deserve to read: when your own work turns out defective, GL commonly does not pay to redo or replace the work itself — "your work" and "your product" exclusions exist precisely to keep the policy from becoming a performance bond. What GL can respond to is resulting harm: the defective pipe fitting that floods the finished kitchen, the failed railing that injures someone. Tearing out and redoing the botched tile is, in most forms’ eyes, a business expense. Specialized professional forms exist for the design side of construction, but the redo cost itself is generally nobody’s policy — a fact better priced into the bid than discovered in the dispute.
Claims-made vs. occurrence, in plain English
GL is typically written on an occurrence basis: the policy in force when the injury happened responds, even if the claim arrives years later. E&O is typically claims-made: the policy in force when the claim is made responds — and only for work performed after the policy’s retroactive date. Three practical consequences: keep the retro date intact when the policy is re-marketed; never let claims-made coverage simply lapse, because past work loses its coverage path the day the policy dies; and when closing or retiring, ask about tail coverage (an extended reporting period) so late-arriving claims still have somewhere to land.