Rink

50 R INK MAGAZ INE march/april 2008 insurance tales ■ Learn to manage your risk from real-world insurance stories Y ou are sitting at your desk analyzing your ever-growing list of to-do's. You have the hockey leagues starting up, rental equipment to reorder and the ice resurfacer is on the fritz. Just then, you get a knock on the door. An unknown individual walks into your office and serves you with a stack of papers. Your visitor coldly informs you that your rink has just been sued. Having no idea what he is talking about, you begin to look through some of the paperwork. The Complaint alleges that John P. Skater slipped and fell on a "soft spot" in the ice during an adult hockey league game. The fall caused him to severely injure his leg and ankle, costing him tens of thousands in hospital bills, physical therapy and lost wages. You read on and learn that the accident took place almost four years ago! "Of course he slipped and fell — it is hockey!" you scream to yourself. "Now what do I do?" Unfortunately, this scenario is not a rare occurrence in the world of personal injury lawsuits. What would seem obvious to many (ice is slippery and accidents happen) becomes obscured as skillful plaintiffs' attorneys attempt to divert attention from the obvious and point the finger directly back at the rink. What makes these cases even more difficult to defend is that the lawsuits often will be filed years after the event has taken place. Attempting to find witnesses and even employees two, three and four years after an accident can often be extremely difficult. On top of that, asking them to remember specific facts about a skating accident years after it took place is often next to impossible. The reason a lawsuit can be brought so remote in time from the accident is that each state has what is known as a "Statute of Limitations." The statute of limitations promulgates the amount of time that an injured party has to bring suit against the tortfeasor. Florida, for example, has a four year statute of limitations. That means that a Plaintiff (John P. Skater) has four years from the date of injury to bring a lawsuit against the skating rink. Crafty attorneys will often wait years to file a lawsuit in hopes that witnesses will leave the area, employees will change jobs and memories will fade. What this leaves is a Plaintiff describing how traumatic an event was, with no witnesses for the Defense to counter the story. Thus, it is important for you to find out how long the statute of limitations is in your state. The biggest reason that plaintiffs' attorneys prevail in personal injury lawsuits is that the skating rink and its employees have failed to keep and/or create the proper paperwork and documentation that would have protected their interests. What type of paperwork? The following is just a short list of the items that you should be documenting and retaining: 1) Incident Reports: As soon as an accident takes place, a member of your staff should fill out a pre-made readily available incident (accident/injury) report. It doesn't matter how small the injury is, document it! This report form should specifically include the time, date and specific location of the accident, as well as detail the extent of the injury. Include a diagram of the skating rink on the accident form. If the accident took place on the ice, have your employee actually go out on the ice, notate where on the diagram the accident took place and inspect the ice to detail if they found any foreign substances, cracks, fissures, soft spots, etc., on the ice itself. Your report form should also include the names, addresses and phone numbers of any and all witnesses. Why? Because when you are sued four years later, you will still be able to locate the person who may have critical facts and recollections of the accident. Have your employees fill out the report; do not let the person or someone with them fill out the report. 2) Ice Resurfacer Logs: You should create a log for your ice resurfacer driver to record his runs. The log should have a time entry for each ice resurfacer run, as well as the name and signature of the driver. Each entry and every run should be recorded and signed. Just recording the runs without the name of the driver is not enough. Why? Because when you need the ice resurfacer driver to testify at trial that he made a run ten minutes before the accident, you had better know who the driver was. Once again, just keeping this information on a Anatomy of a Rink Lawsuit Don't Slip by Failing to Protect Yourself by ADAM KANTOR Well-kept logbooks go a long way in protecting against litigation in your rink.

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