These days, family entertainment often involves doing something that comes with some inherent risk. Businesses that serve these needs have to protect themselves. Whether you run an indoor rock climbing facility or a paintball park or you rent bounce castles or slip-and-slides, you need an effective liability waiver.
These are often included in the user agreement that customers sign as part of their entry ticket or rental. In gyms, the liability waiver is generally in the member contract.
These waivers, of course, have to be sufficiently detailed and legally enforceable. They need to protect businesses from injuries caused by a customer’s own negligence or recklessness. However, they can’t be a blanket protection from anything that could go wrong, like malfunctioning equipment.
Further, a business needs to ensure that a customer has an adequate opportunity to read and understand the waiver. It can’t be written in “legalese.” It also can’t be printed in a font that’s too small to reasonably be clearly visible. Putting the liability waiver on the back of a ticket could potentially be problematic because a customer doesn’t have to sign it.
What if the waiver is online?
Now that liability waivers are often part of online agreements, it’s crucial to have them click on a box that attests that they’ve read the terms and conditions before purchasing or renting a product or service.
Where companies typically lose in personal injury lawsuits is if they’re shown to have been guilty of gross negligence or recklessness. Liability waivers typically don’t offer protection from these things.
There’s no one-size-fits-all liability waiver. It’s not something you get from an online template. You need a waiver that works for your specific business and one that protects you from the risks you take on when people are using your products or services. Having experienced legal guidance is critical to having a sound liability waiver and to enforcing it, if you need to.