Blog - Month: February 2026
Is Your Property Covered During Renovations?
Commercial property owners are often surprised to learn how strict insurance policies can be once a building is considered vacant. Under commonly used property insurance forms developed by the Insurance Services Office, coverage for certain types of damage can be sharply limited if a building has been vacant for more than 60 consecutive days.
At the same time, those ISO forms — and decades of court rulings — recognize an important exception: a building that is under construction is not treated as vacant. Just as important for property owners planning upgrades, that exception has been extended to buildings under renovation as well.
How vacancy exclusions work
Most ISO-based commercial property policies include a “vacancy loss condition.” If a covered building has been vacant for more than 60 consecutive days before a loss, coverage is reduced or eliminated for certain causes of loss.
For buildings vacant beyond that 60-day window, ISO forms typically provide:
- No coverage for vandalism, sprinkler leakage (unless protected against freezing), building glass breakage, water damage and theft or attempted theft.
- Reduced coverage for other covered causes of loss, usually a 15% reduction in the amount paid.
What counts as “vacant” depends on who is insured. For tenants, vacancy generally means the space does not contain enough business personal property to conduct customary operations. For building owners, vacancy usually depends on whether at least 31% of the total square footage is rented or used for normal operations.
These provisions are designed to address higher risk. Empty buildings are more vulnerable to vandalism, undetected water leaks and theft because fewer people are present to spot problems early.
Construction and renovation exemptions
ISO forms carve out an important exception: buildings under construction are not considered vacant, even if they would otherwise meet the definition of vacancy.
Construction sites usually have workers present, materials moving in and out and regular activity that reduces the risks vacancy exclusions are meant to address.
Over time, courts have extended that same reasoning to renovation work on existing buildings. A key case is TRB Investments, Inc. v. Fireman’s Fund Ins. Co., decided by the California Supreme Court in 2006. In that case, the court ruled that a policy’s exception for buildings “under construction” also applied to a building undergoing renovation.
The court reasoned that renovation activity can involve just as much — or more — daily presence as new construction. From a risk standpoint, it would not make sense to treat a building undergoing renovation as vacant while protecting one under construction.
That reasoning is now reflected directly in ISO’s commercial property forms.
The takeaway
Vacancy exclusions are one of the most misunderstood parts of commercial property insurance. ISO forms and court decisions offer meaningful protection for buildings under construction or renovation, but that protection depends on real activity taking place.
Before you start a renovation, call us for a review of your policy language to confirm how your policy defines vacancy and to discuss whether supplemental coverage makes sense. Doing so can help ensure that a temporary period of renovation does not turn into an unexpected coverage problem after a loss.
Stealth Trends Driving Workers’ Comp Premiums
While employers’ main priority for containing workers’ comp costs should be workplace safety, they also need to keep an eye out for three stealth factors that can nudge their premiums higher.
Where employees work, what they do from day to day and how production technology affects workplace behavior are all often flying below the radar for many employers, who may be hit with higher premiums after an insurer audit and worker reclassification. In addition, technology designed to increase productivity — like wearables — may actually raise the potential for workplace injuries.
These issues often surface only after a claim occurs or when the insurer conducts a premium audit. The end result can be a costly surprise when the employer receives a bill for additional premiums.
Remote work creates jurisdiction issues
Remote work arrangements are now deeply embedded across many industries. Recent workforce surveys show that a large share of employees whose jobs allow it now work remotely either full time or part time, a sharp increase from pre-pandemic years.
When an employee works from another state, injuries may fall under that state’s workers’ compensation laws. If an employer is headquartered in Louisiana but has a remote worker who is injured while performing job duties in Idaho, two jurisdictions may be involved.
If that state exposure is not disclosed on the workers’ compensation application, coverage gaps or disputes can arise.
Many employers assume remote work reduces risk because employees are no longer in warehouses, job sites or manufacturing facilities. In reality, the exposure has shifted rather than disappeared. Without clear documentation of where employees work and what they do, insurers may default toward broader coverage assumptions that result in higher-rated classifications or expanded exposures.
Job creep
Another growing issue is job creep — employees gradually taking on responsibilities outside their original job descriptions. This happens frequently during staffing shortages, growth periods, tight deadlines or in smaller operations. Office staff may help with shipping. Supervisors may step into hands-on roles. Employees often wear multiple hats to keep operations humming.
From an insurer’s perspective, what matters is the work performed, not just the job title listed on payroll. When a claim occurs, carriers examine real-world duties closely. If, for example, a supervisor is injured while helping on the line, the insurer may reclassify payroll, split classifications or apply greater scrutiny across similar roles.
This issue is especially common among small and midsize employers, where flexibility is often necessary. However, without updated job descriptions and internal documentation, that flexibility can translate into higher premiums and audit-related adjustments.
Productivity technology challenges
Employers are increasingly using time-tracking software, performance dashboards, automated scheduling systems and wearable devices to monitor productivity, track output and manage work.
While these tools can improve efficiency, they can also subtly alter behavior. Employees may work faster when metrics show they are falling behind. Breaks may be delayed or skipped. Safety steps may be rushed. Early signs of strain or discomfort may go unreported to avoid appearing less productive.
Over time, this increased intensity can raise injury risk, particularly for repetitive motion and ergonomic injuries. In addition, productivity systems may change the nature of the job itself — by increasing lifting frequency, reducing recovery time between tasks or assigning more physically demanding work than originally intended.
What employers should review before renewal
To address these stealth exposures and reduce the risk of being hit with a premium increase after an audit, employers should take a closer look at:
- Where employees are actually working, including out-of-state remote arrangements.
- Whether job descriptions reflect real, day-to-day duties.
- How often employees perform tasks outside their formal roles.
- Whether productivity tools are increasing physical or ergonomic demands.
None of these issues are dramatic on their own. But together, they can quietly drive premium increases, coverage disputes and audit surprises.
Employers who proactively address these trends are better positioned to align coverage with reality — and avoid paying for risks they never intended to assume. If you have questions or concerns about any of the above, please contact us to stave off unpleasant premium surprises.
Why Every Business Needs Hired and Non-Owned Auto Coverage
Even if you have company cars or a fleet of vans, occasions may arise that require an employee to run an errand in their personal vehicle or one of your employees needs to rent a car while on a business trip visiting a client.
In these circumstances if you don’t have the proper coverage, you could be leaving your organization exposed to liability if an employee injures a third party in an accident. There are two types of insurance that are vital in these situations: Non-owned auto coverage and hired auto insurance.
These two policies offer very different types of coverage, and it is important to understand each to ensure you find the policy that is right for your operation:
- Non-owned auto coverage — This insurance protects your company if sued as a result of an auto accident that you or one of your employees has in a personal vehicle while on company business.
- Hired auto coverage — This provides your company with liability insurance for vehicles that you rent, hire or borrow on a short-term basis for business purposes.If you or an employee are in a car accident while driving one of these vehicles for work, hired auto insurance can help pay for your liability costs.
You should consider these two coverage options if your company ever rents cars or vans for business purposes (including travel to conferences, visiting clients, etc.) or if employees use their personal vehicles to run company errands.
These important coverages are usually added to a general liability policy or a commercial auto policy as an endorsement or a rider.
When there are no vehicles titled in the company name, this additional coverage will serve to meet the contract requirement for commercial auto coverage in most states.
How the coverages work
Both hired and non-owned auto insurance are a type of liability insurance, meaning they will only cover property damage and injuries to third parties, as well as any legal fees, settlements or court judgements relating to third party claims. Hired and non-owned auto insurance helps cover:
- Physical damage to a third party’s vehicle,
- Bodily injuries and medical expenses if a third party is hurt in an accident with you or one of your staff, and
- Legal expenses if your business gets sued for negligence.
However, these polices won’t help with:
- Property damage to your business’s hired or non-owned vehicle.
- Medical bills if you or your employee get hurt in an accident while using rented or personal vehicles.
- Liability coverage, property damage or bodily injury from an accident while you or your employee drive for personal reasons that are not related to your business.
Do you need coverage?
If your business rents or borrows vehicles to do work or if your employees use their personal vehicles on business, hired and non-owned auto coverage is crucial to manage your risk.
It can help pay for any property damage that you or your employees cause while on company business in rented or personal vehicles. It also covers vehicles used for your business if they cause bodily injury to another driver in a car accident.
Large Trucks Account for a Third of Work Zone Accidents
Some of the riskiest locations for roadway collisions are work zones, as they often result in changes in traffic patterns and right of way, along with workers present and large commercial vehicles on the scene.
Work zones are designed to improve the safety of workers who are enhancing or repairing roads, freeways, bridges, sewage and other infrastructure by separating construction and maintenance activities from traffic. The crews do that by providing a safe route for motorists, pedestrians and bicyclists and a safe area for the workers on the scene.
That stew of activity and unpredictability sadly results in carnage. In 2023, 899 people died in work zones in the U.S., out of an estimated 101,000 crashes, according to the National Workzone Safety Information Clearinghouse. More than 300 of those fatalities involved large commercial vehicles.
The most common types of fatal accidents in work zones are:
- Crashes involving a commercial vehicle: 33%
- Crashes caused by speeding: 31%
- Rear-end collisions: 24%
With liability risk in mind, it’s important that you take the extra effort to cover driving in work zones during your driver safety training.
At the first sign of road construction, your drivers should slow down. Keep in mind that stopping takes space and time. Depending how fast a truck is traveling, it can take more than the length of a football field to stop, even in the best conditions (good tires and dry pavement). At 65 mph, the stop will take more than 7 seconds to complete.
Stopping distances can be even greater if:
- It is raining or snowing,
- Tires or brakes are worn,
- There is dirt or gravel on the road,
- The truck is carrying a heavy load,
- The truck is carrying a liquid load (especially when the tank is not completely full), or
- The truck is traveling downhill.
The most common types of accident
Let’s look at the most common commercial vehicle work-zone accident scenarios, and why they happen:
Rear-end collisions — These are most common in work zones on freeways, interstates and two-lane highways.
Why they happen: The driver was not aware or prepared for stopped or slowed traffic ahead of them.
Head-on collisions — These are most likely to happen in work zones on two-lane highways.
Why they happen:
- The driver crosses the centerline at night.
- The driver swerves to avoid objects and into oncoming traffic.
Right-angle collisions — These are most likely to happen in work zones on non-freeway multi-lane roads.
Why they happen: The driver pulls out of or turns left into a workspace, intersection or driveway without enough of a gap in traffic.
Sideswipe collisions — These incidents usually occur on freeways, interstates and other multi-lane roadways.
Why they happen: The driver fails to check for vehicles in their blind spots while trying to merge out of a closing lane or into an open one.
Truck collisions with objects or workers — These especially dangerous accidents usually happen in work zones on non-freeway multi-lane roads.
Why they happen: Typically, the driver is traveling too fast to negotiate the work zone.
The American Road Transportation and Builders Association has these recommendations for drivers entering or driving inside a work zone:
- Pay attention to work zone signs.
- Leave enough space between you and the motorist in front of you.
- Be prepared to stop or slow unexpectedly.
- Expect to stop when you see a “Flagger Ahead” sign.
- If stopped or slowed in a traffic queue, consider turning on your flashers to warn traffic coming up behind you.
- Watch for traffic and workers going into or out of the work zone.
- Get into the open lane as soon as possible at lane closures.
- Be especially aware of motorists racing to get ahead of you or trying to turn in front of you at the last second.
- Use alternative routes to avoid work zones whenever feasible.
Corporate Cyber Risk Outlook for 2026
Cyber risks are set to intensify in 2026 as artificial intelligence reshapes how attacks are launched and how organizations defend themselves.
Three new reports agree that cybercrime is becoming faster, more targeted and more disruptive to business operations. AI is accelerating existing threats and shortening the time between intrusion and impact. According to a report by Moody’s Ratings, this shift is pushing companies into “a new era of adaptive, fast-evolving threats” where manual defenses are no longer sufficient to protect an organization.
This is not just a large company problem. Small businesses are increasingly targeted, often because they are seen as easier to breach than larger organizations.
AI is supercharging cybercrime
AI is now widely used by cybercriminals to scale phishing, automate efforts to find website vulnerabilities and create malware that can modify its code to evade detection.
Moody’s “2026 Cyber Risk Outlook” warns that these tools allow attackers to scan networks continuously, exploit misconfigurations at machine speed and launch campaigns against thousands of targets simultaneously.
The World Economic Forum echoes this concern in its “Global Cybersecurity Outlook,” where 94% of leaders surveyed said AI will be the most significant driver of cyber risk in 2026. Nearly nine in 10 respondents reported an increase in AI-related vulnerabilities over the past year, alongside rising cyber-enabled fraud, phishing and software exploits.
AI-enabled social engineering is a particular concern. Advances in voice cloning and deepfake technology are making impersonation attacks more convincing, especially those targeting executives, finance teams and IT staff. These attacks increasingly bypass technical controls by exploiting human trust rather than technical flaws.
New risks from enterprise AI use
The growing use of AI inside organizations is also creating new exposures. Moody’s found that only 29% of surveyed organizations follow the Open Worldwide Application Security Project’s (OWASP’s) best practices guidance for large language model applications, leaving many vulnerable to data leakage, prompt injection and weak access control.
Research from Google Cloud highlights prompt injection as a rising threat in 2026. In these attacks, malicious instructions are embedded in data or user inputs, causing AI systems to bypass safeguards and expose sensitive data.
Ransomware an ongoing threat
Despite improved defenses, ransomware and data-theft extortion remain among the most damaging cyber threats. Moody’s reports that 44% of ransomware attempts in 2025 were stopped before encryption, up sharply from the year before, largely due to better detection and backup practices.
Large enterprises remain prime targets. Their complex networks create blind spots and attackers increasingly focus on extortion tactics that rely on stolen data rather than locked systems.
Google Cloud researchers note that ransomware, data theft and multifaceted extortion continue to generate cascading economic losses across supply chains, with incidents in 2025 resulting in hundreds of millions of dollars in total damage.
What employers can do
While no organization can eliminate cyber risk, the reports point to practical steps that can materially reduce exposure:
Strengthen AI governance. Limit AI system permissions, follow OWASP’s guidance for large language models like ChatGPT and monitor prompt injection attacks and data leakage.
Accelerate detection and response. Automated monitoring and containment tools are increasingly essential as criminals use AI to move quickly through networks.
Plan for data extortion. Create an extortion response plan that addresses regulatory, legal and reputational fallout even when systems remain operational.
Build resilience into infrastructure. Regularly test backups, use cloud systems in multiple locations to spread risk and conduct outage and breach simulations.
Control identity and access. Give staff, systems and applications (including AI agents) only the minimum access they need to do their jobs. Require multi-factor authentication during logins and create just-in-time access protocols so elevated permissions are granted only when needed and automatically removed once a task is complete.
Train employees continuously. Focus on phishing, vishing and executive impersonation scenarios that target human behavior rather than technology.
Secure cyber insurance
Finally, you should consider cyber liability insurance, which can help your business recover quickly from an attack by covering costs such as:
- Data recovery and system restoration after a breach or ransomware attack.
- Legal and regulatory expenses if sensitive customer or employee data is exposed.
- Notification and credit monitoring services for affected parties.
- Business interruption losses from downtime or system failure.
- Public relations and crisis management to help rebuild trust.
Note: Cyber insurance may cover ransomware payments, but coverage is often conditional, increasingly restricted and dependent on policy wording and the circumstances of the attack.