Did Coronavirus Affect the Liabilities for your Business?

Video Transcribed: This is Oklahoma Medical Marijuana Attorney Isaiah Brydie coming at you with another video. This video is going to be all about liability insurance and liabilities of your business during coronavirus epidemic that’s going on in our nation.

So one of the things that’s a problem that’s going on now is that a lot of businesses are thinking of what their potential liabilities would be if there was ever a tracing back of someone’s infection with COVID-19 back to their interaction with their particular business.

So a good example of this is if you’re a personal trainer and you have a gym and if someone went to your gym who was asymptomatic with COVID-19 and then from there, your gym became a vector for multiple people contracting the illness; what do business owners do in that situation? This is a place where your liability insurance may come into play.

Certain businesses, depending on if they have specialized insurance or if they have insurance extensions, could be able to file claims for protecting their business from third party claims against that business.

So that might be something that could be specifically laid out in your general commercial liability insurance, could be something that was an extension to the insurance. It’s really going to depend on what all is in your individual policy, and then the policies and the procedures of your insurance company and things like that.

This is a really, really important thing. We talk about business liabilities in a broader sense. This was one of those situations where we can try to think about liability. Actually, the first level is thinking about liability. There are a lot of businesses that don’t think about what their potential liabilities for their business activities could be.

So thinking about those things and then also too, making sure that we can put up whatever barriers and whatever protections for your business and for you as an individual to protect against potential third party claims due to the activity, whether that’s signing a waiver liability form because of the specific conduct of your business, all the way to making sure that we give sufficient notice and warnings to our potential clients because of our business activity.

This is a really broad conversation to have and it’s going to vary case by case depending on what the business activity is. But be looking at your insurance policies during this time.

It could be covering a lot of things from whether or not you can file the claim because of your loss of foot traffic, whether or not you could file a claim with your insurance because of your loss of business, all of those different things, whether or not you might be able to have shelter underneath your insurance if your business is sued because of events during this coronavirus epidemic, not necessarily because someone got infected, but because you weren’t able to perform your duties and then another business that is a client of yours, sues you or sues your business.

There are a lot of things it could be going on during this situation. I suspect that there’s going to be a lot of litigation coming at this time. So guys, thank you for tuning in. I’ll see you next time.