In Sandoval v. Qualcomm Inc., the Supreme Court today holds the company that hired an independent contractor to inspect electrical equipment at the company’s property was, as a matter of law, not liable to a worker who suffered severe burns during the inspection. [Disclosure: Horvitz & Levy filed the petition for review and briefed (here, here, here, and here) and argued the case in the Supreme Court.]
The court’s unanimous opinion by Justice Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar concludes there is no substantial evidence to fit the case into either of two recognized exceptions to the general rule that a “person or entity hiring an independent contractor . . . ordinarily delegates to that independent contractor all responsibility for the safety of the contractor’s workers.” This is so, the opinion says, because the hirer “neither failed to sufficiently disclose th[e] hazard . . . nor affirmatively contributed to the injury.”
The court explains that the affirmative-contribution exception to the general rule is “satisfied only if the hirer in some respect induced — not just failed to prevent — the contractor’s injury-causing conduct” and that “[i]t is not enough for the hirer’s exercise of control to incidentally give the hirer the opportunity to prevent the contractor’s injury-causing conduct.”
The opinion also finds wanting a form jury instruction, CACI No. 1009B, and tells the Judicial Council and its Advisory Committee on Civil Jury Instructions “to update this instruction with suitable language consistent with this opinion.”
Last month, the court also limited liability for independent contractor injuries, in Gonzalez v. Mathis. Today’s opinion doesn’t mention Gonzalez, probably because Gonzalez isn’t final yet.
The court reverses the Fourth District, Division One, Court of Appeal.
