Lower Your Liability By Understanding the Risks Your Bar Faces

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When you combine people with alcohol, lots of things could happen. People can drink responsibly and have a wonderful time at your bar. Those people can also become completely intoxicated and start a fight or drive home drunk - and for those things, your bar needs to be protected.

With so many liability risks in the bar business, careless management can lead to the ruin of your bar. But if you operate your bar with responsible practices, you can minimize your liability risk and make your bar a safer place for your customers.

It's true that some things that happen at your bar are out of your control. But in cases like that, there are still ways to protect your bar.

You can limit the liability risk for your bar by doing a couple of things, from simple changes like keeping a record of incidents to limiting to more complex changes like instituting a system for evaluating customer intoxication levels. Putting procedures in place and making sure that they are followed is necessary if you plan on staying in the bar business.

Here are some things that you can do to limit your bar's liability:

Posted Alcohol Policies

Let customers know what your alcohol policies are by posting them in public view. Place posters in various places around your bar and make your alcohol policies clear to your customers.

If customers know what your policies are, they won't be surprised when you enforce them.

Employee Alcohol Training

Every employee who serves alcohol to the public should complete a training program on how to serve alcohol responsibly and be well versed on the alcohol laws in your state.

When employees feel confident in state laws and your policies they know not to serve alcohol to minors or intoxicated customers and they can take the appropriate action to slow down service, refuse service, offer food or suggest a taxi.

Mandatory ID Checks

Make sure that employees check every customer for ID, no exceptions, and institute penalties for employees who fail to do so. Checking customer identification 100% of the time will limit your chances of accidentally serving alcohol to a minor who looks 21 or over.

If you have someone working the door, it doesn't eliminate cause for the server or bartender to ask for an ID when taking a drink order.

Keeping Good Records

Recording and storing logs for incidents and other paperwork like employee alcohol training forms will come in handy for insurance and legal reasons. Keep incident logs for any incident that happens in your bar whether a customer slips and falls, a fight breaks out or an employee cuts a customer off.

You should also keep records of completion of employee alcohol training and all of the procedures that you do to serve alcohol responsibly and legally like checking customer identification.

Offer Safe Transportation

Make a standing arrangement with a local taxi service. Call cabs for customers and make it known that safe transportation can be arranged for those who can't drive home. Give customers free overnight parking in your lot so they don't feel obligated to drive home in order to keep their car from being towed.

It isn't wise for employees to drive intoxicated customers home or for you to organize your own taxi service, so just stick to working with another company to get customers home safely.

Institute a Designated Driver Program

If you provide benefits for designated drivers, you're providing an alternative for drinking and driving.

When designated drivers can come to your bar make sure that they can still be part of the fun without drinking. Provide free non-alcoholic beverages (like soda) and offer food discounts for designated drivers. Make sure that there's entertainment available for those who aren't drinking like coin operated games or dancing.

Limit High Alcohol Drinks

Put a limit serving drinks that are very high in alcohol (like doubles, shots or a potent signature drink) and make sure employees stick to that limit. Customers who drink doubles are much more likely to become intoxicated because of the high alcohol content.

Clear Levels of Intoxication

To make it easier for employees to identify customers who have had too much to drink by developing a clear alcohol policy with steps to take when a customer shows the signs of intoxication.

The Green-Yellow-Red system is easy for staff to understand and helps employees recognize and communicate a customer's level of intoxication. In a nutshell, the green level means that staff can continue selling alcohol to the customer, yellow means that the customer is starting to become intoxicated and red means that alcohol service should be stopped.

If an employee thinks a customer is in the yellow, he should notify the manager on duty. The manager should keep an eye on the customer and advise the staff member on what action to take (slowing down drink service, cutting off the customer, etc.)

Offer Alternatives

Make sure that there are several NAB's or non-alcoholic beverages available on your menu. When you offer alternatives to alcohol, you give guests the choice to drink or not to drink but still stay and enjoy the party.

It's also a good idea for employees to offer water or food to patrons that are "slowing down" or may be leaving your bar soon. This will help to slow consumption for customers who are getting close to intoxication and it will also slow the rate of alcohol absorption into the bloodstream.

While you can't prevent some things from happening, you can reduce the chances and protect your bar in the case of liability. Make these operational procedures a part of your day-to-day management and limit the liability dangers for your bar.

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