Is an independent contractor liable? If an independent contractor performs work or provides consulting services to another company, and that company suffers a loss (or deems to suffer a loss) due to the independent contractor, can they sue the independent contractor? What kind of measures can be taken to safeguard the IC from this? Is it better to be an employee or an IC of said company to avoid this type of liability?
Yes, independent contractors are liable for their acts and omissions The contract between the contractor and the principal should set out what the contractor is expected to do and the standard to which they are expected to do it. If the contract does not set this out then they will be required to perform to the standard of a reasonable person doing that sort of work plus any statutory requirements. So, if they are a plumber, then they are required to install the plumbing to the applicable building codes and to the standard that a reasonably competent plumber would do so. If they fail to do the work or fail to do it to the required standard then they are liable for any damages the principal suffers as a result. Further, an independent contractor is liable for any tort that they may commit against a third party. So, to continue the plumber example, if the plumber negligently installs pipe for a builder and that pipe breaks damaging a tenant's goods (i.e someone outside the contractual chain), then that tenant can sue the plumber for negligence but cannot sue the builder or landlord. Employees are the same but also different Employers are vicariously liable to third parties for the acts and omissions of their employees except where they are on a frolic of their own (i.e. doing something that is clearly outside the scope of their employment). At common law, the employee is also liable to the third party and the employer, however, such claims are rarely pursued because a) where there is insurance, the employee is also covered b) the employee may lack the assets to meet the damages and so be &quot;judgement proof&quot; c) it's really bad PR and d) many jurisdictions prohibit it by statute (e.g. new-south-wales). Protection for an independent contractor Insurance Public &amp; product liability certainly. Motor vehicle insurance if applicable. Professional indemnity insurance if the work is of a &quot;professional&quot; nature, that is, involves providing advice rather than just goods and services. Protection for an employee Insurance Check that your employer has the right insurance and that it covers their employees. Is it better to be an employee or an IC of said company to avoid this type of liability? Like you have a choice. The nature of the relationship will determine if you are an IC or an employee. If you are clearly running an independent business then you are an independent contractor. If you are clearly a wage or salary earner then you are an employee. If it's unclear, you are still one or the other and you don't get to choose. See Indepdendent/Contractor vs Regular Employee
If your friend was a salaried W2 full time exempt employee hired by the company to, among other things, write software like this, then the fact that it was developed "off the clock" with the employee's own resources means nothing once he gives it to the company. I mean if I give you a present and it blows up and breaks your arm, I'm still liable even if we didn't have a "contract" - especially if I knew it would blow up. Your friend's position is even worse since the relationship entails the employee's having the employer's best interests in mind. If I were your friend, I'd either figure out how to fix this or take gnasher729's advice from the comments and find a country where it's easy to hide from parties public and private. Maybe buy a bunch of canned food and go live on a boat?
That is, you don't even have to give them a copy of the contract. In the same way you might reference some legal code without actually copying the legal code directly into the contract. If you do not communicate material terms of the contract to your contractor, the contract will be unenforceable due to lack of meeting of minds. Referencing "some legal code", provided that that code is publicly available is fine: your contractor can look it up and decide if they are happy with it. But doing the same with "Independent Contractor Agreement #123" will only work if you provide a copy of it to your contractor. For example, it can be attached to the paper being signed as a Schedule. So, in a nut shell, abstracting prose out is fine as long as it is communicated/attached.
If it is a business expense, yes It depends on the nature of the &quot;job&quot;. If you run a business based in the UK and the job is a contract to your business, then the costs involved in performing the work are tax deductible. If you are an employee and the base location of your job is in France, then these are personal expenses and not tax deducatable.
What happened is that you created a legal mess. You are obviously on the hook for copyright infringement. The maintainers of the project will scramble to replace your code with newly written code. They will likely ask your company which code they are complaining about - that puts your company into the problematic situation that they shouldn't identify code that isn't theirs, that it will be hard to sue for infringing code when they didn't give the project maintainers a chance to fix it, and that everything they identify will be replaced. Since it is your actions that caused the trouble, anyone suffering damages from your actions can sue you.
Was the technician negligent? Just because he broke the oven, doesn't mean that he negligently broke the oven. In breaking the oven, he would have to have done something that a reasonable technician would not have done. Even if he was negligent, is the liability for his negligence excluded by the contract you signed when you hired him? And, if so, is such a limitation allowed under local law? In many parts of the USA, the answer is yes. In either circumstance, the technician is liable for nothing. Notwithstanding, assuming the technician is liable, there is little doubt they are liable for the cost of the repair. They are unlikely to be liable for the cost of providing access as, by the contract, you are responsible for providing this.
Is this how it works? Am I supposed to pay the full quote regardless? No. The contractor is plain wrong. Your agreed commitment to obtain materials directly from the retailer supersedes the initial agreement that totaled 30K. In other words, you two amended the contract. Since then, your obligations under the amended contract were to provide the materials he requested and to pay for labor costs. the contractor is insisting on the full amount, claiming that had I not paid the material I wouldn't have known the difference in cost and he was taking the risk with the quote. That is inaccurate. Once he delegated to you the task of obtaining materials directly from retailer, he exempted himself from any and all risks of giving an inaccurate estimate of the cost of materials. In fact, he shifted to you that risk.
An employer doesn't have the authority to authorize its employees to violate the law. An employee who personally participates in a crime has both criminal and civil liability for the employee's actions. Private sector employers have vicarious respondeat superior civil liability for the actions of their employees taken in the scope of their duties. In other words, anything that an employee of a private sector employer is liable for, the employer is also liable for. Governmental employers do not have vicarious respondeat superior civil liability for the civil rights violations of the employees. Direct civil as opposed to vicarious civil liability, and criminal liability for an employer (governmental or private) is generally limited to acts carried out by employees of the entity at the direction of senior management or pursuant to a policy, explicit or implicit, of the employer. This said, it is the nature of large employers to break tasks into component parts spread over many employees in different parts of the employing entity. In some circumstances, an individual employee's role may be such that the employee lacks sufficient information about the overall course of action of the employer to know that their actions are part of an overall course of conduct by the employer that constitutes a crime or tort. For example, to retreat to an old school example, suppose that there is an employee who sits in front of a shredding machine all day and feeds paper into and clears paper jams, etc. whose job is to shred whatever documents are put in a bin next to his work station. This guy, who makes no decisions regarding what is to be shredded and has no real knowledge of why documents are being shredded, probably doesn't have criminal or civil liability if his labor is used to illegal destroy some documents. For all the shredder guy knows, he could simply be destroying redundant copies of documents to free up space in the filing cabinets while a single archival copy is retained. Typically, criminal laws require some level of mens rea (i.e. intent) which may be intent to do something in particular, it may be knowledge of certain facts, or what have you. An employee is generally only going to face criminal liability is the employee who carries out the wrongful act on behalf of the employer does so with the requisite knowledge and intent set forth in the criminal statute.