Jill Bloom chats with Trent Cotney of Adams & Reese LLC in this most recent podcast of If Walls Could Talk.

What is the scope with warranties? If your company is giving a workmanship warranty, you want to have a document that states what you are providing and what you are not providing.

One issue that Cotney discusses is if that a company wants to have a warranty that is transferable— whether it’s commercial or residential—do you want to extend that warranty if the owner sells to a new party. Regardless of what you want to do, you need to spell it out clearly in the warranty.

Cotney recommends that at a minimum, you inspect/review the warranty before you extend it to a new party. However, there are some states that mandate different conditions for transferability.

Adams & Reese does a lot of OSHA defense nationally, the most common the most used defense is what is known as unpreventable employee misconduct. As an example, if you’ve trained the employee but they just didn’t do work right that results in some sort of claim, as a result, is the company responsible? Cotney outlines what a company needs to do in defense of these cases. It’s important to have a disciplinary procedure in place that’s consistently applied.