When you’ve put in your hardest at work and you’re ready for the weekend, it’s great to grab your friends and swing by a nightclub. A place to drink, hangout and forget that you in fact, still have a job. Nightclubs are a place where you go to kick up your feet and just have a good time.
Forgetting common sense and human decency has a price though. A little too much alcohol more often than not makes the average human being less forgiving and less able to reason. Sometimes it’s someone who wants to settle a score publicly and sometimes it’s a person who accidentally spills a drink on your clothes. While you could settle it civilly somewhere else, after a few drinks, people reason less and start preferring to settle things on the spot.
Bar fights are more common than owners would like and assuming you didn’t start the fight, usually it’s not wise for your personal injury attorney to sue your attacker because there’s the high probability that your attacker isn’t insured or has any money. Therefore, it’s more prudent to focus on suing the establishment itself, but in order to do this successfully, you need to prove their negligence. Here are the criteria for this below, as an attorney, like a Personal Injury Attorney at Andersen & Linthorst can explain:
Staff negligence: Bouncers exist for a reason. Aside from making sure only the proper clientele gets admitted, they also keep the peace and stop altercations before they get out of control. That’s because every establishment owes you a duty of care in keeping all patrons safe. If a fight starts and security personnel doesn’t take any effort to sort the issue before it gets out of control, the establishment might be held negligent.
Alcohol distribution negligence: We all know that alcohol causes us to not be “ourselves,” but every state has “dram shop laws” with variations on severity from state to state. These laws hold stores or nightclubs to not serve alcohol to underage individuals or those who are already intoxicated. If a bar or nightclub serves one too many drinks to the individual that assaulted you, they could be found negligent for causing the assailant to lose his/her reasoning and assaulting you.
Décor and inventory: Say that the nightclub is sued but the court doesn’t find them negligent. The event still happened and the owner has deduced that the fight happened because of “x” reason. If a place becomes known for fights, it’s up to the owner to reduce and eliminate all passive instigators and catalysts of fights. This is often done by hiring security and the right amount of it. Also by securely mounting tables to the floor along with replacing glasses with plastic cups so the glasses can’t be broken to be used as weapons. If an establishment is aware of its fight instigators and isn’t doing anything about it, that is negligence. As the saying goes, “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.”
