Commercial insurance broker in Reston, VA. You focus on growth, we will make sure your coverage keeps up.

No, and this is the most common gap we find on Reston accounts. General liability responds to bodily injury and property damage. It does not respond to the claim a professional services firm actually gets, which is that the advice, the design, the code, or the deliverable was wrong and cost the client money.

That is professional liability, also called errors and omissions. If what you sell is expertise, E and O is the policy that covers the thing you actually sell.

Yes, and please send them before you sign rather than after. Contracts here routinely specify professional liability limits, additional insured status, waiver of subrogation, primary and non-contributory wording, and sometimes a notice of cancellation period.

Several of those are endorsements that have to be added to the policy, not lines typed onto a certificate. A certificate that says something your policy does not say is worth nothing when a claim is filed.

Most professional liability and cyber policies are claims-made, which means the policy that responds is the one in force when the claim is made, not the one in force when the work was done.

Two things follow. Your retroactive date matters, because work performed before it may not be covered at all. And if you let a policy lapse, or switch carriers without handling the transition properly, you can lose coverage for years of completed work in one step. We track retroactive dates for our clients, because losing one is expensive and entirely avoidable.

It changes three things. Workers compensation payroll is rated by where people actually work, and Virginia, Maryland and DC do not administer claims the same way, so the states listed on the policy need to match reality.

Property coverage written for one office does not automatically follow laptops and home setups. And a distributed workforce widens the cyber exposure that your own clients are increasingly asking you to insure and to prove.

At a minimum an annual coverage review, a real renewal meeting rather than a renewal envelope, and a call whenever something material changes: a significant new contract, a hiring wave, a new service line, an acquisition.

Professional services firms change what they sell considerably faster than they change their policies, and that gap is exactly where E and O problems start. For fast-growing clients we move to quarterly by default.

Same business day in most cases.

The delay is never the certificate itself. It is the situation where the contract requires an endorsement you do not carry yet, most often additional insured status or a waiver of subrogation on the professional liability policy, which has to be issued by the carrier. Send us the insurance exhibit while the contract is still in redlines and the certificate is ready the day you sign.