What your MSA actually requires for insurance

You land the engagement. Legal sends the Master Service Agreement. Buried in Section 12 — or Section 8, or an exhibit at the back — is a block of text that starts with "Consultant shall maintain, at its own cost and expense, the following insurance coverages..."

If you've been consulting for any length of time, you've been here. The good news is that most enterprise MSAs require the same four or five things. The bad news is that getting them all right — the right limits, the right endorsements, the right certificate format — takes longer than it should.

This guide walks through what enterprise MSAs actually require and what each requirement means in practice.

The standard enterprise insurance stack

Most Fortune 500 and mid-market technology, financial services, and professional services clients require the following coverages from independent consultants.

Commercial General Liability (GL)

GL is the baseline. It covers bodily injury, property damage, and personal injury claims that arise from your business operations. The most common limits in enterprise MSAs are $1,000,000 per occurrence and $2,000,000 aggregate.

The "per occurrence" limit is the maximum your insurer will pay for a single incident. The "aggregate" limit is the maximum they'll pay across all incidents in the policy year. If your contract requires "$1M/$2M GL," it means both numbers.

Professional Liability / Errors & Omissions (E&O)

E&O covers financial losses your client suffers because of mistakes, omissions, or failures in the professional services you deliver. GL covers bodily injury and property damage — E&O covers economic harm.

If you write code, give strategic advice, design systems, or produce any deliverable that a client relies on to make decisions, they almost certainly require E&O. Standard limits: $1,000,000 per claim and $1,000,000 aggregate.

E&O is almost always written on a "claims-made" basis — meaning the policy in force when the claim is made covers it, not the policy in force when the work was done. This matters for project-based consultants: you may need "tail coverage" to protect work completed under an old policy.

Additional insured endorsement

This is the one consultants most often get wrong. An additional insured endorsement extends your GL policy to cover the client entity as if they were a named policyholder. If a third party sues your client over something related to your work, your policy — not theirs — responds first.

The endorsement must name the correct legal entity. "Acme Corp" and "Acme Corporation, Inc." are different entities. Your contract should state the exact name; if it doesn't, ask procurement.

Waiver of Subrogation

Subrogation is your insurer's right to sue a third party to recover money it paid out on a claim. A Waiver of Subrogation means your insurer gives up that right against your client — they can't sue the client after covering a loss attributable to the client's actions.

Most enterprise MSAs require this. Your insurer can usually add it via endorsement for a small additional premium.

Primary and non-contributory

"Primary and non-contributory" means your GL policy responds first to any covered claim, and your client's insurer doesn't have to contribute. This matters when both you and the client have GL coverage and a claim involves both parties.

It's common in tech and financial services MSAs. It's usually bundled with the additional insured endorsement in a blanket endorsement form.

Notice of cancellation

Many contracts require your insurer to notify the certificate holder (your client) before cancelling your policy — typically 30 days in advance. Standard ISO policy language already requires 10 days for non-payment cancellation. Some MSAs ask for 30-day notice for any reason.

What the certificate of insurance (COI) needs to show

Once you have the coverage, you'll need to provide a Certificate of Insurance — an ACORD 25 form — to your client's procurement team. The COI needs to list:

• Your name and address as the insured
• The insurer name and NAIC number
• Policy numbers and effective/expiration dates for each coverage
• The coverage limits for each line
• The client as certificate holder
• The additional insured endorsement (if required)
• Waiver of subrogation notation (if required)

How long does getting compliant actually take?

With a traditional commercial insurance broker, the process can take days or weeks. You fill out a paper application, the broker submits it to underwriting, underwriting quotes it, you review it, you bind, and the broker generates and emails the certificate.

The bottleneck is usually getting the additional insured endorsement correctly formatted and getting the COI to procurement in a form they'll accept.

With Fennel, the entire flow — contract upload → AI extraction → quote → bind → COI delivery — takes under 10 minutes. The AI reads your MSA and pulls every requirement automatically, so you're not hand-copying limits from a PDF into a form.