If you’ve ever had a contractor call with a signed-up project, a hard start date and a contract PDF that looks like it was stitched together from five templates and a lawyer’s red pen, you’ll recognise a question brokers in Australia and New Zealand are often forced to answer: When you’ve only got 30 minutes before you go to market, what are the hidden contract promises that will outstrip available cover and boomerang back as uninsured exposure?
Time pressure doesn’t just compress the workflow; it changes the risk. In that half-hour window, brokers aren’t doing a “contract review” in the idealised sense - they’re doing triage. The goal is to spot the clauses most likely to create uninsured gaps, impossible-to-place requirements, or disputes that erupt months later when a claim lands and everyone discovers the contract asked for something no insurer ever agreed to underwrite.
Dominique Vagi (pictured left), chief underwriting officer for Hutch Underwriting, has seen her brokers come under this pressure.
"Clients will sometimes come at the last minute with a contract and a large project and a sudden need for insurance," said Vagi.
One big challenge can be that construction contracts often contain contractual promises that read like insurance requirements but aren’t actually insurable in the way the contract assumes. “The public liability insurance clause will occasionally request the principal or head contractor also be covered as named insureds under the policy, and that’s not easy to achieve generally in the market," she said.
For brokers trying to protect the contractor while also keeping the project moving, that mismatch between what the contract demands and what the market will write becomes a central tension. And it’s why, in a short scan, the “insurance clause” is only the starting point. The real job is to find anything that quietly shifts risk in a way the client hasn’t priced, planned for, or even noticed.
Start with the clauses that sound like routine insurance housekeeping but actually change the scope of what the contractor is promising to make good. Vagi flagged reinstatement requirements as a classic example because they can be written to extend far beyond contract works and liability intent - pulling in existing structures or third-party property. The contract might be trying to make the contractor the backstop for losses that are not theirs, not controllable, and not covered under the policy the market expects to provide.
From there, watch for “add-ons” that sneak delay-related financial promises into contract works wording - such as a principal’s loss of revenue if works are delayed. In practice, that kind of exposure belongs in a different risk structure (often a principal-controlled program) and it can create a dangerous expectation gap if the contractor assumes their contract works policy will respond.
Then there are professional indemnity clauses that ask for more than the PI market can sustainably deliver: unlimited reinstatements, unusual settlement controls, or requirements that clash with insurer rights. Even if a broker can secure a PI placement, contract language can still set up a future argument about whether the contractor has complied.
“We often have to tell clients we are not lawyers, we cannot give legal advice, and we can really only advise on the things that are obviously insurance-related," said Austin Rosier (pictured centre), principal risk adviser for Omnisure.
Yet “obviously insurance-related” in construction is rarely simple, particularly when contracts demand principals be treated as joint insureds, impose waivers of liability, or attempt to rewrite who carries what responsibility on site.
“A complete waiver of liability can place a smaller contractor in a precarious position if they find themselves responsible for things they weren’t 100% responsible for and perhaps should be joint liability," said Rosier.
That can be key for brokers operating in the real world of subcontractors and thin margins: a contract can turn a manageable operational risk into an existential balance-sheet risk overnight - especially when the risk transfer is phrased as “standard” and the contractor signs without understanding the consequences.
Peter Jeeves (pictured right), head of construction for Lockton, said the best defence against this rushed situation is to make sure it doesn’t happen.
“Being under pressure is the thing you try to avoid when doing contract reviews,” he said.
However, when the rush is unavoidable, Jeeves said anchoring your review in the project’s context before diving into wording is a good strategy. “It’s important to take a step back and look at the project: the relationship of the contracting parties, the scope of works, the location, the contract value, and any unique project risks," said Jeeves.
So that even in a half hour, you have the best possible shot at asking the questions that reveal whether the insurance requirements make sense - or whether they’re copy-pasted demands that don’t match the risk reality of the job.
That context is also what turns “we can’t do that” into credible pushback. Brokers routinely encounter insurance requirements that don’t reflect the job’s actual exposures and clients need more than a refusal - they need a rationale they can take back to a principal or head contractor. The broker’s value under time pressure is not just speed, but clarity: this is what the contract asks for, this is what the market will actually underwrite and this is where you’ll be exposed if you sign as-is.
And because modern contracts scatter risk allocation across schedules, particulars, definitions and annexures, speed requires a practical method. Jeeves’ go-to is resolutely unromantic, but effective: “Control F is often my best friend - finding those provisions quickly without having to read the whole contract," he said.
Put simply, the half-hour contract scan isn’t about reading faster, it’s about searching smarter. Find the provisions that expand insured obligations beyond policy intent: named insured requests for principals, reinstatement promises that sweep in third-party property, delay-related financial requirements, PI terms that don’t match market structure, settlement control clauses that cut across insurer rights and excess caps the market won’t honour on complex jobs.
In Australia and New Zealand, the pressure to “just get it placed” won’t ease. But brokers can still protect clients by treating that 30-minute window as a targeted hunt for the clauses most likely to create uninsured exposure, contractual breach, or a claim that turns into a dispute. The goal isn’t perfection. It’s preventing the most preventable surprises.
