If you own a business, maybe you feel proud about that. Perhaps it took many years and lots of effort to get that company off the ground. You feel like its proud parent. It’s probably upsetting to think someone could sue your company.
The legal steps for suing companies after consumer injuries take some time, but if someone goes this route, you will hear about it sooner or later. You’ll get the paperwork stating you must appear in court to defend yourself and your company.
If that happens, you must deal with the lawsuit as best you can. However, if you can prevent these scenarios and put yourself in a situation where they never happen, that’s even better.
Let’s talk about what your business might do to prevent personal injury lawsuits.
Put Up Adequate Signage if You Have a Hazardous Situation
What you’ll need to do to avoid personal injury lawsuits won’t look the same for every company. That’s because no two companies conduct themselves exactly the same way.
For instance, if you make products and send them to customers through the mail via an eCommerce business model, staying safe and avoiding personal injury lawsuits looks different than if you have some brick-and-mortar store locations. Let’s say for a moment that you have some physical locations where the public can shop.
If so, if a situation even arises where a member of the public might hurt themselves, you must put up adequate signage and warn them. You must also act quickly to fix the problem.
For example, if you’re running a grocery store, and a jar drops on the ground and spills, you should instruct a worker to quickly mop it up. They also need to put up a wet floor sign and try to block off that area, if possible.
These sorts of actions can often prevent customer injuries. If you do this kind of thing, you make it less likely that a customer will bring a personal injury lawsuit against you.
Do Regular Safety Checks
You should also do regular safety checks, whether you have brick-and-mortar store locations that customers frequent or not. If you have a warehouse facility, you should have someone in charge of safety who makes the rounds every day. They can check for fire hazards or anything else that might harm someone.
You can have safety inspectors who patrol your physical store locations where customers shop if that’s your business model. If you make products on an assembly line, you can have safety inspectors there as well.
If you manufacture or sell just about anything, you will have individuals from independent agencies probably come sometimes to look over your facilities. However, you shouldn’t just do what they say to avoid unsafe situations and lawsuits.
You must also look out for safety hazards or workplace violations on your own. If you have a rigid structure in place that checks for safety issues in addition to outside agencies looking for them, that’s two lines of defense to prevent a possible injury and an accompanying lawsuit.
Scrutinize Every Product Before Getting It on Store Shelves
You must also make sure that every product that you manufacture passes the most rigorous safety checks before you get it onto store shelves and into the public’s hands. If you make products, then maybe you want to get them out to the public as fast as possible. Maybe you have a new holiday line, and you want to make some money off of it by the end of Q4.
That speed might get you in a lot of trouble if you emphasize getting those products out the door before you test their various components enough. If you have safety checks that go over every part of a product and test it in every situation in which a customer might actually use it, that’s a great way to potentially avoid lawsuits. It’s when you start ignoring safety protocols that you often harm customers with faulty products.
Make Every Employee Attend Regular Safety Seminars
You can also watch out for situations where an employee might hurt themselves. A worker might bring a personal injury lawsuit against you, just like a customer might.
You should have regular safety seminars that your employees must attend. You might have them once or twice per year. If you make products on an assembly line or store them in a warehouse that uses heavy equipment to move pallets and boxes around, those situations can cause injuries if everyone doesn’t conduct themselves safety and carefully.
Even if you have individuals with you for many years, and they never do anything remotely wrong or dangerous, they should still attend these refresher safety courses. You can attend as well to show everyone you’re a team player. These seminars should cover every potentially hazardous situation that might arise in your workplace ecosystem.
Train Each New Employee Correctly
You can also do one additional thing if you want to avoid personal injury lawsuits. You can train each new employee very carefully before they let them start the job.
Maybe you need them to start work urgently. However, if you don’t take time to train them correctly, they might very easily hurt themselves or someone else. If they’re working in a warehouse, on an assembly line, in a lab, or in any other situation where harm might occur, you need to make sure they know the recognized safety procedures and follow them.
It may take days to train each new employee, or weeks. If they’re doing an inherently dangerous job, it will take more time than if they’re simply standing behind a cash register in one of your stores.
Just make sure they have the training they need. That way, if they hurt themselves and then bring a personal injury lawsuit, you can show at trial a document they signed stating they got the necessary training and their own carelessness or negligence caused their injury.