3 Sticky Situations That Employer Liability Coverage Can Help You With

26 April 2018
 Categories: Insurance, Blog

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Employer liability coverage is one of the insurance coverage you should be thinking about if you have employees. The coverage will come in handy if your employees are injured on the job and workers compensation does not cover the cases or damages. Here are three specific situations that employer liability coverage may help you with:

Your Employee Is Suing You in a Dual Capacity

Workers compensation pays for workers injuries in case they are injured while on the job. Typically, the coverage comes into play irrespective of where the liability for the injury lies. However, this doesn't mean that the workers cannot sue you in other capacities if they believe you are responsible for their injuries.

Consider a case in which you run a restaurant and an employee has developed food poisoning after buying food from you. In addition to filing a worker's compensation claim, the employee can also sue you for defective product injury. In such a case, the employer liability coverage will handle the product liability claim.

You Are Being Sued By a Third Party

Employer liability coverage can also help defend you and pay for damages if you are being sued by a third party. This makes sense because workers compensation insurance only applies to your employees, and not to third parties.

Consider a case in which a delivery truck hits one of your workers and the worker sues the owner of the delivery truck and also files for workers compensation. In such a case, the owner of the delivery truck can sue you for not providing a safe unloading area; it is this lawsuit that your employer liability coverage will help you with.

You Are Being Sued by Your Employee's Family Member

Lastly, your employer liability coverage may also come to your rescue if it is not your employee who has a claim against you, but rather, one or more of their family members. As you know, workers compensation only deals with employee damages and not damages incurred by employees' family members. Therefore, if an employee's spouse is suing you for loss of consortium or an employee's child is suing you for a contagious disease that they got from their parent who picked it from your workplace, then employer liability coverage will come to your rescue.

As you can see, there are many cases in which employer liability coverage can come in handy. Talk to services such as Scovotti Insurance so you can buy the right coverage for your business.