Thursday, July 17, 2014

Employer's liability for employees purposeful actions

One interesting area of personal injury concerns where someone is injured by the intentional acts of an Employee of a business while they are on the job. If an employee injures a member of the public by his or her own intentional conduct then the business itself can be held responsible for the injury. The Nevada Legislature passed NRS 41.745, which is used to determine if an employer can be held liable for the intentional actions of an employee. This statute states that 1. an employer is not liable for harm or injury caused by the intentional conduct of an employee if the conduct of the employee: a) Was a truly independent venture of the employee; b) was not committed in the course of the very task assigned to the employee; and c) was not reasonably foreseeable under the facts and circumstances of the case considering the nature and scope of his or her employment.
So determining whether the employer is liable or not basically comes down to how far the action deviated from the performance or duties of the job. For example, a bouncer beating up a customer at a bar when there was no justification to do so, would probably create liability for the business owner. This is because the bouncer is hired to use force to protect other customers or the business, so using force to wrongfully harm someone is close enough to the job task, and it is foreseeable to the business owner that this may occur. Overall, whether an employer will be liable for the acts of an employee is usually a contentious issue and really depends on the facts of each individual case.