Accidents are bound to happen in a business. When one does occur, your company should have specific protocol to follow. One of these points should be completing an incident report. This provides some basic information about what happened just in case the victim decides to pursue legal action. In some cases, the report can include pictures if those will show important points.
Once you know that a person did file a legal claim against the business, determining the defense strategy to use becomes a top priority. You have several options. One of these is known as the open and obvious defense.
This defense claims that the issue that leads to the accident would be obvious to any reasonable person and that the victim could have avoided it and prevented the injury. This basically means that an average person would have been able to spot the problem. Some business owners make sure that they can use this defense by utilizing signage to warn of dangers. For example, they might place a bright wet floor sign near a spill.
It is sometimes possible for an injured person to claim that they are an exception to the open and obvious rule. For example, if there is something so distracting near where they got into the accident, they might claim that the incident should be immune to that defense.
Because of the uncertainty of these cases, you should ensure that you are exploring all the options that you have for a defense. The potential expenses that you are facing can be considerable, so plan to work hard on your side from the start of the matter.
