A legal alert published September 4 breaks down the latest round of litigation over CG 20 10 — the ISO endorsement that adds a general contractor as an 'additional insured' on a subcontractor's general liability policy.

The form matters because of what it does and doesn't cover. CG 20 10 protects the GC for claims tied to the sub's 'ongoing operations' — while it takes a separate, differently numbered endorsement to cover claims that surface after the job is done, like a facade failure discovered years later. The fight the alert describes is over how far that ongoing-operations coverage actually reaches once a GC's own negligence is part of the story, and whether contract language trying to carve that out holds up once a court gets ahold of it.

New York's Scaffold Law — Labor Law 240 and 241 — puts GCs on the hook for gravity-related injuries almost regardless of whose fault it was. That makes additional insured coverage from a sub's policy the thing standing between a GC and a six- or seven-figure verdict, not a paperwork formality. If the endorsement attached doesn't actually cover the GC's own share of the blame — or it's an older, narrower edition of the form — the GC's own policy eats the loss instead.

Before your next subcontract goes out, check two things: which edition of CG 20 10 the contract actually requires (ISO revised the form more than once, and the editions aren't interchangeable), and whether the certificate of insurance you're collecting has the actual endorsement pages attached — not just a line that says 'additional insured' with nothing behind it. That gap surfaces exactly when a claim is filed, which is the worst possible time to find it.