Employment claims are filed quickly. Your defense starts the day the EEOC letter arrives.

Employment practices liability protects employers from claims by current, former, and prospective employees alleging wrongful termination, discrimination, harassment, retaliation, and wage and hour violations. EPLI claims have grown faster than nearly any other liability line, and the defense costs alone — even on a meritless complaint — routinely run into five and six figures.

Most EPLI programs aren’t underpriced. They’re under-built. Wage and hour exclusions, sublimited third-party coverage for customer harassment claims, narrow definitions of insured persons, and missing prior acts language — these gaps are common, and they don’t surface until a charge has already been filed.

At Avanti Group, we run a Business Risk Diagnostic™ before we build any EPLI submission. We map your workforce, your HR practices, your turnover patterns, and your specific exposures — and make sure the policy actually responds to the claim scenarios most likely to arise in your business.

Who We Work With

We place EPLI programs for businesses across Iowa and the Midwest, including:

• Restaurants and hospitality with high-turnover, tipped workforces
• Healthcare facilities and medical practices
• Construction and trades businesses with field employees
• Manufacturers and distributors
• Retail and e-commerce operations
• Professional services firms
• Property management and habitational accounts
• Nonprofits and faith-based organizations

The Coverage Lines That Matter Most

A complete EPLI program has both core coverage and important endorsements. The components we evaluate and place include:

• Wrongful Termination — claims alleging termination in violation of contract, public policy, or anti-discrimination statutes
• Discrimination — race, sex, age, disability, religion, national origin, pregnancy, and other protected-class claims
• Harassment — sexual harassment and hostile work environment claims, including third-party harassment from customers or vendors
• Retaliation — claims alleging adverse action after an employee complaint, EEOC charge, or whistleblower disclosure
• Wage & Hour Defense — sublimited defense coverage for FLSA, state wage law, and misclassification claims
• Third-Party EPLI — harassment and discrimination claims by customers, vendors, or other non-employees
• FLSA & ERISA Endorsements — specific coverage for federal employment statutes that vary by carrier and form

The Risks Most EPLI Programs Miss

Wage and hour claims are routinely excluded or sublimited. Misclassification, off-the-clock work, and overtime claims have produced some of the largest employment settlements in recent years. Most EPLI policies exclude these or cap defense costs at a fraction of what’s needed.

Third-party EPLI is frequently missing. A customer who alleges harassment by an employee, or an employee who alleges harassment by a customer, may not be covered without a third-party EPLI endorsement. We make sure this is in the program for any customer-facing business.

Prior acts coverage is rarely scrutinized. EPLI is written on a claims-made basis with a retroactive date. If the retro date isn’t set correctly, claims arising out of pre-policy conduct may not be covered — even if the claim itself is filed during the policy period.

Defense outside the limit vs. inside the limit changes everything. Some EPLI policies erode the limit with defense costs; others provide defense outside the limit. For an employment matter that drags on for months, the structure significantly affects what’s left for indemnity.

How to Get Started

EPLI isn’t a commodity product. The right program depends on your workforce size, your industry, your turnover patterns, and your HR practices. We need to understand your business before we can build the right program for it.

Call our office or use the button below to start a conversation. We’ll review your current program, identify any gaps, and let you know exactly where you stand before we ever go to market.

Want to know where your coverage really stands? Book a Business Risk Diagnostic →

Learn more

Employment practices liability sits inside a broader management liability picture—where today’s claims actually come from (retaliation, harassment, and the wage-and-hour suits most EPLI forms exclude or sublimit), and why employment claims routinely name officers and directors individually alongside the company, so how the EPLI and D&O programs are structured together determines who is protected and by which policy

• EPLI Claims Trends: Wage and Hour, Retaliation, Harassment — The employment claims hitting businesses hardest fall into three categories: retaliation, the most common basis in EEOC charges every year since 2009 and now appearing in more than half of all charges filed; harassment, which carries the largest settlements and reputational cost; and wage and hour, the coverage trap — excluded from most EPLI forms or covered under a small defense-costs-only sublimit — with Iowa’s Civil Rights Act reaching employers at just four employees, far below Title VII’s fifteen. Third article in the Management Liability cluster, first on the EPLI sub-hub.
• EEOC Charges: The First 30 Days — An EEOC charge is an administrative complaint, not a lawsuit — but it is the mandatory first step toward one, and the first thirty days set the trajectory: preserve every relevant record under a litigation hold, notify the EPLI carrier before spending a dollar on lawyers (the charge itself, not the eventual suit, is the claims-made trigger), work with carrier-appointed panel counsel, and treat the position statement as a document that follows the case for years — with Iowa’s parallel ICRC track reaching employers at just four employees and a 300-day filing window. Fourth article in the Management Liability cluster, second on the EPLI sub-hub.
• EPLI for Restaurants: The Highest-Frequency Sector — Restaurants generate more employment practices claims, more often, than almost any other class of business — a young, hourly, high-turnover, tipped workforce managed by supervisors promoted off the line — and tipped wages are the most dangerous exposure on the menu: tip-credit notice failures, side-work disputes, and manager participation in tip pools scale a single payroll error into a collective action, while standard EPLI forms exclude wage-and-hour claims entirely or cap them at a modest defense-only sublimit; third-party coverage for customer harassment and Iowa’s $4.35 tipped minimum and four-employee ICRA threshold round out what a restaurant placement must answer. Fifth article in the Management Liability cluster, third on the EPLI sub-hub.
• Crime, Employee Dishonesty, and Social Engineering: Three Policies, One Loss — Employee dishonesty coverage pays when your own people steal; social engineering coverage pays when an outsider deceives an authorized employee into sending funds willingly; cyber pays when systems are breached — the same missing dollars can implicate all three, and which policy responds turns on exactly how the money left: the crime form’s separate insuring agreements and the discovery vs loss-sustained trigger, the manifest-intent standard for employee theft, the voluntary-transfer gap that keeps computer fraud coverage from paying deception losses, the routinely sublimited social engineering endorsement with its verification-procedure conditions, and the vendor-email-compromise seam where crime and cyber can both stay quiet. Seventh article in the Management Liability cluster, fourth on the EPLI sub-hub.
• D&O for Private Companies: Why It’s Not Just a Public Company Product — Directors and officers insurance is not a public company product: private company owners, officers, and board members are sued personally by employees, customers, co-owners, creditors, and regulators over the decisions they make running the business, and neither the corporate structure nor a general liability policy protects their personal assets when that happens — the claims land in the gap GL was never designed to fill, and Side A, Side B, and Side C divide the protection between the individuals and the entity. First article in the Management Liability cluster.
• D&O Side A, Side B, and Side C Explained — A directors and officers policy is three coverage agreements stacked inside one form: Side A pays individual directors and officers directly when the company cannot or will not indemnify them, Side B reimburses the company for indemnifying its people (how most claims actually pay), and Side C covers claims against the entity itself — and because the three sides usually share one policy limit, order-of-payments provisions and a dedicated Side A DIC layer exist to keep entity defense costs from eroding the protection of the individuals. Second article in the Management Liability cluster.