You have to accept the prospect of personal injury lawsuits as being normal if you’re a business owner and you welcome customers and visitors onto your property. You’ll have to pay for special insurance to guard against the risk of being sued for unanticipated personal injury, even if you never have any personal injuries on your premises.
It’s your duty, as a business owner, to create an environment that makes patrons feel safe on your premises. Keep in mind that if you fail to do that and a customer or visitor is injured while on your premises, he or she has every right to sue for personal injuries.
A personal injury lawyer in St. Albert knows that a patron must prove that all three elements were in place to be able to sue, either in or out of court:
• You owed him or her a duty of care
• You breached that duty of care
• The patron was harmed because of that breach.
How a Patron Can Prove Duty of Care
The patron would have to prove that you owed him or her a reasonable standard of duty of care. The courts realize that keeping your premises completely hazard-free would be next to impossible to do. Doing the following can help you maintain a reasonable duty of care towards your patrons:
• Create and follow a regular inspection procedure to keep your premises safe almost all of the time
• Do regular cleaning
• Place signs warning customers of wet floors
• Clean up muddy or watery areas near the storefront when it’s raining outside
• Repair cracked infrastructure near your premises
Note that this is not an exhaustive list of the precautions you can take to make your premises safer. Additionally, keep in mind that the plaintiff will often need to call in expert witnesses to determine what the proper standard of care is/should have been!
Proving Breach of Duty
You’re breaching your duty of care as a business owner if you’re not fulfilling your business’s duty of care towards its patrons. A good example would be if a customer slips on some spilled applesauce on the floor. You would have breached your duty of care because it would have been your duty to remove the spill as soon as you found out about it. You should also note that different breaches correspond to different duties of care.
Proving that the Breach Caused Harm
You won’t win your case, either in or out of court, as a plaintiff, if you can’t prove that the breach harmed you in some way. There are many types of harm that you can suffer from:
• Pain and suffering
• Medical expenses
• Lost present and future income/wages
• Loss of enjoyment of life
You’ll have to prove as the plaintiff is that the breach caused you a certain degree of harm.A good example of this would be if there was broken glass near the shop where you visited, but you cut yourself when your pocketknife opened and fell out of your purse. In that instance, you would probably not be able to collect damages.