In many states, your legal status on the property affects what obligations the owner or occupier have towards you. There are a few different categories of visitors, so you will need to know which one you fit into to help you determine if an owner/occupier was negligent.
Invitee
Invitees are people who come onto the property for the purpose of doing business with the owner. The owner/occupier receives an economic benefit. A good example might be a patron of a restaurant or a store.
Property owners owe the highest duty of care to invitees. They must correct, or warn about, any dangers they know about or reasonably should have known about based on an appropriate examination of the property.
Licensee
Licensees are invited guests, but they enter a property for their own purposes rather than because they were invited in to help enrich the property owner. If you go to a friend’s house to enjoy an afternoon together, you would most likely be viewed as a licensee.
Property owners owe an intermediate duty of care to licensees. They must correct conditions they are aware of that could create a danger and must warn about dangers they are aware of or should be aware of. But they don’t have the same obligations to inspect for hazards that they would if invitees regularly entered their premises.
Trespasser
Trespassers are people who enter properties without permission. Surprisingly, property owners still owe some obligations to trespassers. For example, they can’t actively set traps for them or create dangerous conditions on purpose. Property owners may also sometimes need to provide a warning about certain dangerous conditions, especially if they have known trespassers on their land.
Children
Children are in a special category because they aren’t expected to have the same cognitive abilities as adults. They may not be aware they are trespassing or may be attracted to a property by things like a trampoline or swimming pool or other hazards classified as “attractive nuisances” because of the risk they prevent.
If owners are aware that children are or may be trespassing or aware they have an attractive nuisance that could cause injury or death, they have a duty to reduce the danger (such as by putting up a fence). If they fail to do so, they can generally be held liable for the consequences.
Employees
Generally when an employee is injured while at work they are not entitled to bring a premises liability case and instead must pursue a worker’s compensation claim, although there are situations such as where an employee is doing work at a job site not owned by the employer or the employee is injured in an area of the building owned by someone else where it may be possible to file for premises liability.
Comparative Fault in Premises Liability Claims
In some cases, you may be partly responsible for your injuries and the property owner or occupier may also be partly to blame. When this happens, state laws determine your rights.
In most states, comparative negligence rules apply. This means you can still pursue a claim for partial compensation as long as you were less than 50% or less than 51% to blame (depending on state). You can only recover part of your damages, with the amount you receive equal to the percent of the property owner/occupier’s fault. If the owner was 60% responsible and you suffered $100,000 in damages, you could recover $60,000.
A small number of states apply different rules called contributory negligence rules. In these states, if you’re partly at fault for your own injuries, you are unable to pursue a claim at all.
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