Licensees

A licensee is someone a property owner invites onto their property despite not being open to the general public. If you invite your friend to your house for a social gathering, your friend is a licensee.

A licensee can also be a “bare licensee,” meaning they enter the property not by direct invitation but without objection. Examples of bare licensees are door-to-door salespeople and mail delivery people who drop off packages at your door. Property owners owe a lower level of care to licensees, especially bare licensees, than to invitees.

Licensees assume care for ordinary risks to the premises’ current condition. In other words, property owners only have to take reasonable care to protect licensees from extraordinary risks, hidden perils, and reckless misconduct from which the licensee cannot protect themselves.

With licensees, a reasonable care standard for the safety of visitors applies.

Determining the standard of reasonableness owed by the property owner to the licensee depends on an examination of factors, including:

• The circumstances or conditions of the property upon arrival
• The use or purposes of the property
• Knowledge or likelihood of (i.e., foreseeability) the accident or injury happening
• Reasonableness of the property owner’s actions to rectify the hazard or warn visitors that it exists.

Unlike the duty allotted to invitees, though, property owners do not have to inspect the premises and eradicate ordinary hazards. However, they must have a reasonable knowledge of the danger likely to cause injury.

An injured party can demonstrate a property owner’s knowledge in the following ways:

• Proof that the property owner saw the condition with their own eyes.
• Proof of prior incidents concerning the same unsafe condition.
• Proof that the property owner attempted to remedy the unsafe condition but failed to do so completely.

Trespassers

A trespasser enters an owner’s property without explicit, implicit, or legal permission to do so. Property owners’ duty of care is much lower for trespassers. Landowners are not legally responsible for protecting people who enter their property without permission because they don’t expect anyone to need protection. But property owners also cannot willfully injure trespassers.

Additionally, if a property owner is aware of a potential for trespassers, they cannot intentionally cause injury to non-visitors by way of unsafe conditions or gross negligence. The law defines gross negligence as an act or failure to act that constitutes a high degree of indifference to risk or human safety.

Trespassers might be awarded compensation for their injuries, with the assistance of an expert premises liability lawyer, if:

• The owner created or maintained an unsafe condition.
• The condition was likely to cause serious injury or death.
• The owner was aware the condition was undiscoverable by trespassers before being injured by it.
• The owner did not use reasonable care to warn trespassers of the existing risk or condition.

Different rules, standards, and levels of care apply to child trespassers. An attractive nuisance is an artificial condition (for example, a swimming pool) on a property owner’s land that they know or should know is likely to attract a wandering child. The property owner can be liable for the child’s resulting injuries if the claimant can show that a reasonable person could assume a child is likely to be lured to the dangerous condition.