Exclusive: Duty of Care in a Dangerous World

February 18, 2025

Industry attorney Joshua Grimes tackles how planners need to think about duty of care in an increasingly perilous environment.

Duty of care — a meeting planner’s legal and ethical obligation to ensure the safety and well-being of attendees, speakers, and staff at their events —has become increasingly critical in a world where, just in the past few months, a healthcare executive was shot and killed in Midtown Manhattan on his way to an investor conference at a hotel just across the street. Add in raging wildfires in the Los Angeles area that caused widespread death and destruction, disastrous flooding in Spain, blizzards and ice storms across the U.S., and more, and it’s apparent that duty of care is more important than ever

But where does duty of care on the event planner’s part begin and end? Prevue recently caught up with industry attorney Joshua Grimes, Grimes Law Offices, to learn more about what planners need to know now.

Prevue: What does duty of care entail for meeting and event professionals when so much of what has been happening is out of their control?

Meetings industry attorney Joshua Grimes, Grimes Law Offices

Grimes: Broadly speaking, duty of care means that a planner should take the precautions any reasonably prudent person would take to prevent injury, damage and other bad occurrences.

You can’t guarantee that something isn’t going to happen, but in general, you have to take reasonable steps to protect against foreseeable issues. Of course, what’s foreseeable is generally only obvious in hindsight, right? If someone’s injured at your event or there’s some other harm, someone could always say that you breached your duty of care because it was foreseeable. While anyone can make that allegation, they would then have to prove it.

Prevue: How can a meeting professional know if they’ve gone far enough in their duty-of-care precautions?

Grimes: At the end of the day, it’s up to the arbitrator or a jury, if it comes to that. This is always the issue, because people can always sue for X, Y and Z — the question really is, are you going to be found liable? Related to that is what the cost will be if you are found to be liable. Even if you’re found not to be liable, that sometimes can be almost as expensive if you have to follow the legal course through a jury trial.

Prevue: To take a recent, horrible example: If you have a keynote speaker come to harm on the way to speaking at your event, what would be a reasonable duty of care for a circumstance like that?

Grimes: You’d have to take material risks into account. Suppose your speaker is staying at a hotel five blocks away from the venue and they choose to walk to the meeting through a sketchy area. Say no one advises them of the risk and they get assaulted. Someone could make a claim that you knew there was a risk or a danger and you didn’t do anything to prevent it.

This is why some groups bus people from hotels, even when they’re not that far away — they’re creating safe passage routes for conventioneers to get to the venue. But conventioneers also have an obligation to act reasonably. So if someone wants to act reckless, say they walk from their hotel to the to the conference venue for several blocks with their money hanging out of their pocket and their convention name tag on — which can attract attention — that could be conceived as their not taking reasonable precautions themselves to prevent harm from befalling them.

Prevue: Is part of the planner’s duty of care to inform attendees not to wear their lanyards when they’re outside of the meeting space or walk around with their money hanging out of their pocket?

Grimes: Well, not a legal obligation necessarily, but it’s probably smart to inform them, just in case they don’t know. If someone gets hurt and they sue, they’ll always say that you didn’t do enough, and then it’s up to the legal system to say how much is enough,

Let me give you an example. If you have a meeting where, in the past, your speakers have required security because protesters have showed up, there may be a case for negligence if you don’t have security. But if you’ve never had an issue and have no reason to anticipate one, it may not be negligence to not have security.

Prevue: What advice would you give to planners who want to want to do a reasonable amount of duty of care diligence without having to think of every possible what-if scenario? What would be some reasonable precautions to take to make sure you’re covering your bases?

Grimes: They should assess the meeting location, including the risk that that speakers or content will raise attention from people outside of the meeting and possibly draw a protest. If there are concerns about security, it’s better to have some plan for extra security, which the meeting host will probably have to pay for, as opposed to the venue.

Depending on the risk level, it’s also a good idea to interface with the local police, or at least with the hotel security, to assess what your needs might be. In the last year or so, police have recommended some groups cancel their meetings because they didn’t have adequate resources to protect the meeting.