Insured Contract The Enumerated Categories
The Five Specific Insured Contracts, and Why They Matter Most When the Catch-All Is Gone
Key Takeaways
- The five specific insured contracts offer crucial coverage when the catch-all is removed from a policy.
- These contracts include leases, sidetrack agreements, easements, municipal indemnities, and elevator maintenance agreements, each covering various liability scenarios.
- The insured contract provision allows one party’s policy to cover another’s liability through specified agreements, expanding potential recovery options.
- Check for assumptions of liability within these contracts, as they can unlock coverage in situations where catch-all provisions have been endorsed away.
- Reading both the contracts and policy endorsement schedules carefully is essential to identify hidden coverage opportunities.
Parts One through Three of this series concentrated on the broad catch-all — subpart (f) of the insured contract definition — because it reaches the widest range of everyday injury fact patterns. But the definition names five other categories before it gets there, and treating them as boilerplate is a mistake this final installment aims to correct. Each of the five is a self-contained route to coverage that can carry a personal injury or wrongful death case on its own. And each becomes especially important in a situation Part Two flagged: when a policy has been endorsed to strip out the catch-all.
Why the Enumerated Categories Can Be the Only Route Left
Recall from Part Two that the Contractual Liability Limitation endorsement, ISO form CG 21 39, deletes the catch-all — subpart (f) — from the insured contract definition. What it does not delete are the five enumerated categories that precede it. A policy carrying CG 21 39 still affords insured contract coverage for a lease of premises, a sidetrack agreement, an easement or license, ordinance-required municipal indemnity, and an elevator maintenance agreement. So in exactly the situation where an attorney relying only on the catch-all would find the gate shut, one of the enumerated categories may still be open. The lesson is to check the endorsement schedule, confirm whether the catch-all survives, and — whether it does or not — test the facts against the five specific categories as well.
Two general features apply across all five. First, the coverage is blanket: the qualifying agreements need not be scheduled on the policy. Second, the timing rule carries over — the bodily injury or property damage must occur after the contract was executed. With that framing, consider each category in turn.
Lease of Premises
A contract for the lease of premises qualifies as an insured contract, with one carve-out: the portion of a lease that indemnifies another for fire damage to premises rented to or occupied by the named insured is excluded. For injury litigation, the significance is that lease agreements routinely allocate tort liability between landlord and tenant, and that allocation can pull one party’s policy into coverage for the other. Where a person is injured on leased premises and the lease contains an assumption of the landlord’s tort liability by the tenant — or the reverse — the insured contract provision can make the assuming party’s CGL respond on behalf of the party whose liability was assumed. A landlord who at first appears to have only its own coverage may in fact be an insured under the tenant’s policy, and vice versa.
Sidetrack Agreement
A sidetrack agreement is a contract governing a private rail spur — a short length of track connecting an industrial facility to a railroad’s main line, together with the allocation of responsibility for its maintenance and operation. These agreements characteristically require the industrial customer to assume the railroad’s tort liability arising from the sidetrack. The category is niche, but in the settings where it appears — manufacturing plants, grain elevators, rail-served warehouses — it is potent. A worker or bystander injured in connection with sidetrack operations may find that the customer’s CGL, through the insured contract provision, covers liability the customer assumed on the railroad’s behalf, opening a source of recovery that a claimant looking only at the railroad’s own coverage would miss.
Easement or License Agreement
Any easement or license agreement qualifies, with one exception: an easement or license in connection with construction or demolition operations on or within fifty feet of a railroad is carved out. Easements and licenses — for pipelines, utility lines, access roads, and similar rights to use another’s land — frequently contain an assumption by the grantee of the grantor’s tort liability for injuries arising from the use of the easement. Where someone is injured in connection with an easement or license, and the grantee assumed the landowner’s tort liability, the grantee’s policy can respond to the landowner’s liability through the insured contract provision. The fifty-foot railroad carve-out is worth remembering, because it can quietly remove coverage in exactly the industrial and rail-adjacent settings where these agreements cluster.
Ordinance-Required Municipal Indemnity
The fourth category covers an obligation, as required by ordinance, to indemnify a municipality — except in connection with work performed for a municipality, which the catch-all handles instead. Part One introduced this category through the trench-collapse example and the point that it is fact-dependent. To restate the dividing line: where a private party is compelled by ordinance to indemnify a city — commonly as a condition of working in or affecting the public right-of-way — and the work is not itself for the city, the ordinance-required indemnity fits this enumerated category. Where the work is for the city, it moves to the catch-all. A cleaner practical example is a city employee, officer, or agent named in an injury suit after a private contractor’s work affects the public way. If the ordinance or related permit terms require the contractor to indemnify the city and its employees or agents for liability arising from that work, the contractor’s CGL may respond through the insured contract provision. The point is not that the contractor’s policy eliminates governmental immunity; it is that the indemnity obligation may extend the contractor’s coverage to the public employee or agent whose liability was assumed.
Elevator Maintenance Agreement
An elevator maintenance agreement qualifies as an insured contract, and this category is among the most practically useful and least appreciated in injury work. Elevators and escalators are typically serviced under maintenance contracts in which the maintenance company assumes the building owner’s tort liability arising from the equipment. When a person is injured by an elevator or escalator, the building owner is an obvious defendant — but the owner may also be an insured under the maintenance company’s CGL through the insured contract provision, and the maintenance company’s coverage may be both larger and more clearly applicable than the owner’s own. An attorney who tenders the owner’s claim to the maintenance company’s carrier, on the strength of the maintenance agreement’s indemnity language, may find a source of coverage that never appeared on the owner’s declarations page.
The Common Thread
Across all five categories, the analytic move is the same one that animates the entire series. Identify the written agreement standing behind the relationship; read it for an assumption of another party’s tort liability; confirm the category into which that assumption falls; and check the policy — including its endorsement schedule — to see whether the definition has been narrowed. The enumerated categories reward this discipline in settings the catch-all discussion can overshadow, and they can be the whole case where the catch-all has been endorsed away.
Closing the Series
The insured contract provision is, in the end, a single idea applied across many settings: a written contract can make a party an insured, and can make one party’s policy answer for another’s liability, entirely apart from the declarations page. Part One introduced the mechanism and the distinction between coverage and liability; Part Two examined the assumption-of-liability language that triggers it; Part Three followed the consequences when a carrier ignores it; and this installment returned to the enumerated categories that round out the definition. Taken together, the four parts share one practical instruction — read the contracts behind the case as closely as the policy, because that is where the coverage often hides.
