Litigation

Apr 1, 1997 12:00 PM, By KATE DOHERTY

If you ask a lawyer whether you will be sued and what the outcome will be, the response is predictable: It depends.

Bobby Ricks, a senior law instructor at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center, Glynco, Ga., says companies that have taken appropriate security precautions stand a better chance of prevailing in court.

Ricks cites a case in which Motel 6 Corp. settled a rape case for $10 million. Today, such a case is less likely to be settled, he says, because companies aren't running as scared as they once did. A settlement amounts to a company saying, To prevent further litigation, we'll pay you, says Ricks. If the proper security measures are in place and if factors such as duty of care and foreseeability have been considered, the company has grounds for defense in a court of law.

Ricks was one of several speakers at Access Control's Security System Integration Conference and Expo in New York. He led a Feb. 24 technical session concerning the legal issues facing the securitization of America, entitled Don't Land in the Courtroom.

Paying Oduty of care' its due According to Ricks, in common law there is no legal duty to prevent a crime, nor to intervene as one happens. But that is legally, not morally, speaking, he points out. When the duty to provide security is undertaken, there comes with it a required measure of care.

Congress requires basic life safety standards, says Ricks, and the first thing a plaintiff's lawyer will say to a defendant is, You didn't comply with regulations, to which there is seldom room for argument. But in cases for which there are no statutes or regulations, decisions are often based on an assessment of duty of care.

Two cases in the South, brought to court a year apart, resulted in different rulings. In the first case, a couple was robbed in an enclosed hotel hallway. The couple sued, but a South Carolina court ruled in favor of the hotel, saying it did not have the duty to protect. In the second case, a man had ducked out of the rain under the overhanging roof of a business. He was robbed and shot. He sued, and a Louisiana court ruled in his favor, saying there had been a duty to protect.

Foreseeability determines liability Such cases beg the question, What is the required level of security? Foreseeability is the key word of the '90s in terms of crime, says Ricks. In a New York case, a woman had been assaulted in the parking lot at Saks Fifth Avenue - an upscale department store. She sued, but the court ruled in favor of the store, saying the incident was not foreseeable, because such an assault had never happened on the premises.

To reduce liability, companies can obtain information about their susceptability to crime, but it can be difficult. Before crime-reporting requirements were instituted, many colleges denied rape happened on their campuses. Because they denied knowledge of rape, rape was less foreseeable, and the colleges were less accountable. Now the law requires such crimes be reported.

Another strategy for reducing liability is to carefully assess security measures. He cites a case concerning an apartment building in which tenants had long complained the intercom system did not work. A woman was assaulted by someone who had been buzzed in without benefit of identification through the intercom. She sued the apartment building and won.

Ricks recalled the words of consultant Philip Crosby: Quality is neither good nor bad; it is simply conforming to requirements.

Ricks' employer, the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center was founded by the Department of the Treasury in the '70s to combine training for federal agencies. In 1996, 25,000 people were trained at the center. Ricks says the number one reason for training people in law enforcement is to prevent lawsuits. He says that often, security measures are implemented not out of concern for life safety, but because people are afraid of being sued.

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