Common Contracts
1 similar Hold Harmless and Indemnity Agreement contracts
Hold harmless and indemnity agreementHold Harmless and Indemnity Agreement • June 27th, 2021
[Update: For my more recent take on this issue, see this 2012 post.]At a seminar I gave last week, I suggested that hold harmless and indemnify are essentially synonyms. Some participants were skeptical, so I thought I’d better research the issue.Black’s Law Dictionary supports my view. It defines hold harmless as follows: “To absolve (another party) from any responsibility for damage or other liability arising from the transaction; INDEMNIFY.” (It defines indemnify as follows: “To reimburse (another) for a loss suffered because of a third party’s or one’s own act or default. 2. To promise to reimburse (another) for such a loss. 3. To give (another) security against such a loss.”)But in Mellinkoff’s Dictionary of American Legal Usage, David Mellinkoff says that “hold harmless is understood to protect another against the risk of loss as well as actual loss.” He goes on to say that indemnify is sometimes used as a synonym of hold harmless, but that indemnify can also mean “reimburse for
