Reviewing a certificate means comparing it against the document that says what it should contain, not against a stored summary of that document. The contract is the source of truth. Everything below is the order to read them in, and what tends to go wrong at each step.
Updated September 2026.
Start with the contract, not the certificate
Find the insurance section in the lease, master service agreement, subcontract or tender. It is rarely in one place. Requirements are commonly split between an insurance article, a schedule at the back, and an indemnity clause that quietly adds an obligation the insurance article never mentions.
Read all three before looking at the certificate. Reviewing in the other order anchors you to what the certificate happens to say, and you end up confirming it rather than testing it.
The checks, in order
- Named insured. Does it match the contracting entity exactly? Variants after a restructuring are a common and expensive miss.
- Limits. Per occurrence and aggregate, against what the contract requires. Check whether the contract asks for limits to be dedicated rather than shared.
- Additional insured. Required? Then which form, and for ongoing operations, completed operations, or both. A certificate noting AI status proves nothing on its own.
- The endorsement itself. Confirm it exists on the policy. This is the single most common source of E&O claims in certificate work.
- Waiver of subrogation. Required, and endorsed, not just noted.
- Primary and non-contributory. Same test. Wording on the certificate is not the endorsement.
- Certificate holder. Exact legal name and address as the contract specifies.
- Dates. Policy period covering the full contract term, including any option years.
- Sub-limits and exclusions. The ones that quietly remove what the limit appeared to give.
The step people skip
Confirming the endorsement. A certificate can say additional insured, waiver of subrogation and primary and non-contributory without any of them being endorsed on the policy. Nothing about the certificate looks wrong. The gap only surfaces when a claim is tendered and declined, by which point the client relied on the certificate and the brokerage is the one holding it.
Why this gets skipped under pressure
Done properly against a long contract, this is not a five minute job. A seventy page lease with amendments takes real time to read, and nobody is doing that at four o'clock on a Thursday during renewal season. So teams shortcut to a requirement list typed in at onboarding, which was an interpretation of the contract and has since aged.
The way to make the full check survive a busy week is to make verification fast rather than to rely on discipline. When every extracted value comes back quoting its source page, confirming it takes seconds instead of a re-read. For reference, the median time to read a full document during a nine week pilot at Westland Insurance was one minute twenty-three seconds.
Record what you checked
Whatever the review finds, the record of having done it is what answers the question years later. Timestamped, attributed, with the source quote attached. Reconstructing a review from memory is not the same as producing one.