Attentiveness Is The Key To Avoiding Lawsuits
Michael Babboni
Premises Liability
If you run a business yourself, you know that there is always that delicate balancing act to make sure your “bottom line” is profitable. That is to say, you don’t go crazy spending money where you don’t need to, and being inefficient with where your monthly and yearly operating budget goes. No one becomes rich by spending money pointlessly, or acting inefficiently.However, there is one area where money and attention are crucial, and that is in the maintenance of your property, especially if you run a business where the public at large comes to your place of work often to do business there, such as a shop, restaurant or other retail outlet.
It’s Your Responsibility
As a business owner, anything that happens on your property to your customers is your responsibility, assuming the customers themselves are behaving in a reasonable manner. This means that if they sustain an injury on your property, especially if it is due to some element of your property, then you are liable for a potential personal injury lawsuit.
This is where attentiveness is especially important. If you or an employee notices the occurrence of an accident, such as a spill in a restaurant, or the motor oil left on the ground in a garage, you should have this type of mess cleaned as quickly as possible. You should also put up signs, barriers and other public notifications.
Putting up public notices while a mess is being cleaned up may seem, on the surface, to be a waste of money, but in reality, it is a form of security and protection. By making the effort to notify the public of a mess and cleaning in progress, you are providing proof that you are taking steps to protect the public from a potential hazard.
Cleaning such messes and mishaps quickly is also critical to avoiding a lawsuit. If, for example, your place of business operates in the evening, and the light bulbs in a stairway blow out, leaving that stairway pitch black, the longer you leave the situation untended, the greater the chances of someone falling down that stairway, injuring themselves and legitimately complaining that they were injured because of the carelessness of your business.
Protect Your Business
If you don’t act quickly on potential hazards in your place of business, or spend the money on warnings and notifications of such, then you run the risk of losing much more money in a successful personal injury lawsuit claimed against your company.
You have to ask yourself, if “being too busy to deal with that right now,” or thinking, “those signs are expensive,” is really worth the risk of injuring your business or losing far more money in a lawsuit. Just like with owning a home, or even taking care of your own personal health, making the effort to be attentive to hazards, and warning the public of them is good “preventive maintenance,” that can help to protect you from a much more damaging lawsuit.
Always remember that the people at your place of business, even customers coming in for just a few minutes, are your responsibility. And if you don’t treat them that way, the law may fine you accordingly.