Does it matter whether the business's insurance claims history looks unusually high?

Yes, an unusually high claims history is worth understanding rather than glossing over, for a few distinct reasons. It can affect your own ability to get insurance and what it will cost, since insurers price and sometimes decline coverage partly based on a location's or operation's claims history, even under a new owner. It can also point to an underlying operational issue — a pattern of slip-and-fall claims, product-related claims, or workplace incidents often has a cause that doesn't automatically disappear just because ownership changes.

There's also a legal dimension: repeated claims of a similar type can sometimes indicate a known, unaddressed hazard, which matters both for your own future liability exposure if the same conditions persist under your ownership and for understanding what you might be inheriting if you're buying shares rather than just assets, since claims and the underlying corporation's liability history travel with a share sale in a way they generally don't in a clean asset purchase.

Ask for the actual claims history from the current insurer, not just a general sense of "we've had some claims," and have your broker assess it before finalizing your own coverage. A Treadstone business lawyer can help evaluate what an elevated claims history means for your specific deal structure.