Everyone knows that we live in a litigious society these days. We’ve all heard the stories about seemingly outrageous lawsuits, like the woman who sued McDonalds because the hot coffee she ordered was hot when she spilled it on herself.
It’s always been common sense to protect yourself by reducing your potential exposure to legal action. But maybe it’s a little bit more important these days. And installing a landscape lighting system offers a benefit that we don’t talk about much: it can reduce your liability exposure.
Have You Heard of Premises Liability?
If you’re a homeowner, it’s your responsibility to keep your property safe for others. If people are injured while they’re on your property, you could be held liable. It’s called “premises liability.”
That means that even if a trespasser on your property has an accident, you could potentially be held legally liable.
How Landscape Lighting Can Reduce Your Liability Exposure
The most common types of lawsuits brought against property owners are classified as “slip and fall” accidents. And a frequent cause of slip and fall accidents is outdoor walkways and stairways that are poorly lit. A properly designed outdoor lighting system can vastly reduce the risk of a slip and fall accident occurring on your property.
There are many techniques for lighting walkways and pathways. And these lighting techniques do far more than just reduce your liability risk; they also add a distinctive touch of elegance and charm to your property.
Step lighting is a particularly useful and unobtrusive method of clearly lighting stair steps. Recessed into the face of each step and louvered to light only the step below, step lighting can completely eliminate dark zones and murky areas that are accidents waiting to happen.
Ask Us For a Landscape Lighting Evaluation
You navigate your way across your property every single day. You do it in daylight and in dark. And you know all your walkways and pathways like the back of your hand. So you might not even notice a problem with poorly lit areas.
But that doesn’t mean that problem areas don’t exist. And left uncorrected, poorly lit areas on your property’s walkways or stairways are likely to eventually cause an accident.
So if you’d like an experienced eye to survey your outdoor lighting to look for potential trouble spots, just give us a call. We’ll be happy to swing by and take a look. We’ll either give you a thumbs-up, or offer some suggestions for making your property safer and reducing your liability risk.
Either way, you’ll be able to breathe a bit easier. Because any opportunity to reduce your premises liability is a good thing.