Risk Management

You are the Risk Manager of a large corporation. On May 27, 2018 one of the company’s employees had an accident involving five other vehicles. Photograph’s of the wreck are available below. Upon investigation you learn the white pickup truck you see in the photographs is owned by your company. It was issued to this employee who works for the real estate department. His job is to supervise the construction of your new stores in a three state area. His supervisor lives in another state. The accident happened on a Sunday night – a day in which business is typically not conducted. Upon further investigation, you learn that the employee had been to the private home of the foreman for a general contractor. He was there for several hours. While there, they discussed briefly the construction of a new building. The overwhelming majority of the time was spent watching a race on TV, drinking beer, eating BBQ and later – drinking shots of whiskey. Your employee left the private residence, traveled in the wrong direction for him to be going home (which is what he told you he was doing when the accident happened) and ran a red light causing a chain reaction. His blood alcohol was measured later at the hospital as .33 – over 4 times the legal limit. Several people were injured include a 3 year old girl who had bilateral pelvic fractures. From these facts – draft a memorandum to me analyzing your company’s liability under a theory of respondeat superior and under any independent allegations of negligence you can think of. You may assume that he had a pre-employment drug test that was negative and a pre-employment check of his driving record showed him eligible to drive. He had been employed for approximately 8 months when this happened. The company has no notice that he has any alcohol problem prior to this incident. He violated and will acknowledge under oath that he violated many of the company’s policies regarding use of a company vehicle. He did sign and acknowledge the company driving policy prior to this accident. If there are other facts missing, identify those facts which you believe would be critical to your analysis.