In many states, your legal status on the property defines your rights and consequently the level of responsibilities that the owner/occupier has towards you. There are a few distinct classes of traveler, and so you have to work out which one is negligent.

Invitee

Invitees are those visitors who go to the property in order to do business or engage in some form of transaction with the owner of the property. The owner/occupier profits in an economic way. An example can be a client who has bought some meal at a restaurant or a particular item at a shop. Invitees are those persons who are invited to the premises, and as a result property owners have the highest degree of responsibility for their safety. They must correct, or warn about, any dangers that they know of, or ought to have known of, depending on the extent of investigation which was done on the property.

Licensee

Invitees are business invitees, yet they come on to a property for their own reasons other than to help the property owner, get simple benefits out of their property. Should you load yourself into your vehicle and proceed to a friend’s house which you all decide to spend the afternoon together, you would be regarded as a licensee.

The legal relationship between hosts and invitees is that the hosts must exercise reasonable care for the guests’ safety. They need to provide any fix to one that they know exists which may pose a danger and they need to alert one that may exist or should exist if they are knowledgeable enough. However, owners and possessors are not under the same duties to search for dangers they are if invitees frequented their property.

Trespasser

Trespassers are those individuals who have encroached or intruded in another person’s compound or premises without any authorization. However, trespassers are not totally devoid of rights in the eyes of the law whereby property owners still have some duties towards them. For instance, they cannot purposely go out of the way to look for them with intent to capture or purposefully make some formation hazardous simply so, they can use it against the latter. They may also at times require giving notice to other parties of some perils that exist on the premises especially where the Irrigators has knowledge that the certain individuals are a trespasser on the Irrigators’ property.

Children

Citizens belonging to this category are children since they are not supposed to be intelligent as adults are. This could often happen when they do not know they are invading someone else’s property or maybe drawn to a given compound by for instance, a trampoline or a swimming pool, or any other attraction that is categorized as ‘‘attractive nuisance’’.

This, if the owners know that children are or can be at the particular place trespassing or know that there is something that attracts children in such a place which poses a threat of causing harm such as death or injury then they have the responsibility of minimizing the risk, for instance, by installing a fence. If they do not, they can usually be expected to bear the consequences of the outcomes they seek.

Employees

In general, an employee cannot sue for premises liability if he or she is injured in the course of employment since workers are accorded worker’s compensation benefits to deal with such circumstances, nonetheless, there are occasional conditions like, if the worker is carrying out tasks at another person’s premises or he/she slips in an area of the edifice owned by a different individual, there is a claim for premises liability.

With Reference to Premises Liability Lawsuits (A Comparative Analysis of The Concept of Comparative Fault, The Extent of The Duty of Care)

At times, contributory negligence is at play meaning you were to some extent at fault for the occurrence of the injuries and the property owner or occupier may also be partly liable. If this occurs, state laws define the rights you are afforded and those that may be denied to you.

As it will be seen, more often than not the rule of comparative negligence will apply. This means you can still seek claim for partial compensation assuming provided that you were below 50% or below 51% at fault depending on the state. A claimant is only compensated in proportion with the recklessness displayed by the property owner/occupier, and this is done by limiting the amount to such a percentage. If it was a case of 60/40 distribution in favor of the owner and you incurred a loss of $100,000 then the owner compensated you $60,000.

However, the above stated rules are not in use in all the states rather a few states use Contributory negligence rules. These are the states where any comparative negligence and it means that if a victim was partly responsible for an injury, they cannot seek compensation.