What insurance do you need to sign a partnership or vendor agreement in life sciences?

When you sign a partnership, reseller, platform, or vendor agreement, the counterparty almost always attaches an insurance exhibit that lists the coverages and limits you must carry, name them as an additional insured for, and evidence with a certificate before the contract takes effect.

The coverages requested are usually general liability, products or professional liability, and cyber liability. The limits are often modest and achievable. The part that stalls deals is the wording underneath the limits, which the other side's legal or procurement team checks precisely.

A common baseline in life-sciences and digital-health agreements is commercial general liability at $1,000,000 per occurrence and $3,000,000 aggregate, products and completed operations liability at similar limits, and cyber liability at $1,000,000 covering privacy, data security, and, where patient data is involved, HIPAA-related claims.

Higher-risk relationships (hospital purchase contracts, GPO supplier agreements, sponsor master service agreements) push these higher and add umbrella or excess requirements. The specific numbers always come from the contract in front of you, so the exhibit itself is the source of truth, not a general rule of thumb.

Meeting the dollar limits is rarely the hard part. Certificates get bounced back because the policy is missing the endorsement language the contract requires: the partner named as an additional insured, coverage that responds on a primary and non-contributory basis, a waiver of subrogation in the partner's favor, and a specific number of days of cancellation notice.

A certificate that shows the right limits but omits that language does not satisfy the exhibit, and the counterparty's reviewer will send it back. Each round trip costs days, which is why reading the exhibit against your actual policy before you promise a certificate is worth doing first.

Read the insurance exhibit clause by clause against your current policy and identify where the program meets, partially meets, or falls short of the requirement. Where it falls short, the fix is usually an endorsement or a program change rather than a wholesale replacement.

Build the coverage to satisfy the wording, not just the limits, so the certificate clears the counterparty's review on the first pass. For an early-stage or pre-revenue operator, these requirements are generally achievable at reasonable cost; the value is in getting the structure right so the deal is not held up.