What security does a Georgia business owe to customers as invitees?

· 3 min read

A Georgia business owes its customers ordinary care to keep the premises reasonably safe, and that duty can include protection against foreseeable criminal acts. The level of security required is not fixed; it scales with the danger the business knew or should have known about.

The invitee relationship and the duty it creates

A customer who enters a business to shop, dine, or transact is an invitee, the visitor category Georgia law protects most strongly. Under O.C.G.A. § 51-3-1, the owner or occupier must exercise ordinary care to keep the premises and approaches safe. Georgia recognizes that this care can extend to guarding against the criminal acts of third parties when those acts are foreseeable. Importantly, the business is not an insurer of customer safety. It does not guarantee that no harm will occur; it must only act reasonably in light of the risks it faced.

Security scales with foreseeable risk

Because the duty is one of reasonableness, what a business owes depends on its circumstances. A low-risk location may satisfy its duty with basic measures, while a site with a history of violence may need substantially more. Foreseeability is the dial that adjusts the requirement, and Georgia courts read that dial chiefly from a record of earlier substantially similar crimes on or near the property, weighed together with everything else the setting reveals. Under Sturbridge Partners, Ltd. v. Walker, prior crimes need not be identical to the later attack to put a business on notice; even earlier property crimes can signal a foreseeable risk of personal harm. Depending on the risk, reasonable measures a business might owe could include:

  • Adequate lighting across entrances, walkways, and parking areas.
  • Working locks and access controls on the portions of the property it controls.
  • Functioning cameras or monitoring where appropriate.
  • Trained personnel or security patrols where the danger warrants them.

No single item is mandatory everywhere. The law asks whether the overall response was reasonable for that business and that risk.

Limits on the duty

The duty has boundaries. It generally covers areas within the business’s control and dangers it had reason to anticipate, not every conceivable crime. An injured customer must also show that a security failure helped cause the harm, meaning reasonable precautions would likely have prevented it. O.C.G.A. § 51-12-33 then splits responsibility on a percentage basis across the business, the customer, and the wrongdoer who committed the crime, and a customer found at least half to blame takes nothing. The two-year clock in O.C.G.A. § 9-3-33 limits when the customer may file.

The bottom line

A Georgia business owes its customers, as invitees, ordinary care that can include reasonable protection against foreseeable crime, but never a guarantee of safety. The specific security required rises and falls with the foreseeable danger, and any claim depends on tying a security failure to the harm under Georgia’s fault rules.

This article is for general educational and informational purposes only and is not legal advice. It does not create an attorney-client relationship, and Georgia law may change. For advice about a specific situation, consult a licensed Georgia personal injury attorney.

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