Legal Question in Personal Injury in Georgia
I own my home and have a large in ground swimming pool. Money is tight so I have been thinking of renting my pool out for birthday parties and such. I have no idea how to go about doing this and not be liable for pool accidents such as children running and falling on the concrete, or drowning ( I hate to think of that happening). I live in Haralson County Georgia.
3 Answers from Attorneys
It's a horrible idea because you WILL be liable. It may also violate local zoning and business license laws. If you do it, you'd need to carry tens of millions in insurance, and would likely need to employ and pay professional lifeguuards.
You won't escape lawsuits and potential liability, and the only possible hope for the first incident would be insurance. When you try to get as much insurance as you would need, you would find it impossible for many reasons. It was good you asked before just doing it, but it would most definitely not work for a long list of reasons.
I agree with both of the previous accident lawyers. You can ask people to sign waivers for their injuries (after getting a lawyer to draft them), but those very often aren't valid for many complicated reasons. Also you could get whatever amount of insurance you can afford (although I seriously doubt any company would write that policy), but you would need to make sure the policy covered these types of accidents, and then would have a big risk that anyone injured would want more than the policy amount. The best approach for anyone to avoid liability is to purchase a LOT of insurance, and not do something risky (which, this is risky). I mainly wanted to chime in to encourage others to buy much larger policies than many purchase, even for auto accident coverage, like a minimum of 300K, and an equal amount of uninsured motorist ("UM") coverage (for auto accidents). And don't do this pool rental thing. Bad, bad, bad idea. Lots of liability issues that can't be avoided.