Professional employees' exposure to risk of negligence claims from the client

Ronald William Craig and Wilson C. Barnes

Construction Management and Economics, 2007, vol. 25, issue 7, 811-819

Abstract: Construction professionals owe duties of care and skill to clients in both contract and tort. Usually the principal or the corporate employer takes responsibility for employees' negligence under the principle of vicarious liability. But analysis of court judgments from England, New Zealand, Hong Kong and Florida (USA) reveals circumstances in which professional employees might attract personal liability to the firm's client, despite an apparent lack of contractual or tortious relationship with that client. Professional employees of unincorporated businesses might be more exposed to this risk than employees of incorporated businesses. Factors causing professional employees to be uninsured include lack of contractual privity between client and employee and absence of compelling rules or statutes. Professional employees seem unaware of these risks. Increased awareness of these risks could encourage employees to take out insurance but clients will resist paying twice to insure the negligence of both principal and employee.

Keywords: Construction law; contract law; negligence; liability; professional (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2007
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/01446190600987712 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:conmgt:v:25:y:2007:i:7:p:811-819

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/RCME20

DOI: 10.1080/01446190600987712

Access Statistics for this article

Construction Management and Economics is currently edited by Will Hughes

More articles in Construction Management and Economics from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().