Insurance Law Lesson 18: Is it the ISO form?

Insurance Services Office. ISO provides many services to insurers, including data, analytics, and generic policy forms for many types of policies.

If an insurer wants a person’s claim history, it can get the “ISO Match Report.” Similar to a Carfax report, this will give a line item information regarding claims involving the subject person.

For the policy forms, ISO licenses its policy language to insurers. Many insurers use ISO forms directly. Others use modified versions of the ISO forms. This allows for a certain consistency in coverage provided in a given type of policy.

Is your homeowner’s policy written on an HO3 form? Is your commercial general liability written on a CG 00 01? Those are ISO forms, and it says so on the bottom of every page. (The four digits after the form number are the month and year of publication of the version of the form that you are looking at).

But, even if your policy is written on an ISO form, you cannot rely on assumptions about the coverage offered in the policy because there can be endorsements that modify the standard ISO language.

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