Who is liable if a building elevator malfunctions and injures me in Georgia?

· 3 min read

When an elevator malfunctions and injures someone in Georgia, the building owner is usually the first party in focus, because Georgia holds owners to a high standard of care for these devices. Yet a malfunction by itself does not prove liability, and a maintenance company or manufacturer may share or carry the fault depending on what went wrong.

The owner’s heightened duty

Georgia recognizes that an elevator is a means of carrying people and applies a demanding standard to it. An owner owes a duty of extraordinary care to passengers using an elevator, and that duty cannot be delegated away by hiring an outside service company. In practical terms, the owner is expected to keep the device properly maintained and inspected, respond to known problems, and warn passengers or take the equipment out of service when a defect appears.

Even with this heightened duty, the owner is not an insurer of safety. A malfunction does not create a presumption of negligence. To hold the owner responsible, the injured person generally must show the owner could have discovered the problem before the malfunction and failed to act, or knew of a malfunction and neither repaired it nor warned passengers.

Other parties who may be at fault

Because the owner’s duty is non-delegable, hiring a maintenance contractor does not let the owner off the hook, but that contractor can still be liable for its own negligence. When several actors share the blame for an elevator injury, O.C.G.A. § 51-12-33 lets a jury assign each one a portion, reaching even those left out of the lawsuit. Potentially responsible parties include:

  • A maintenance or service company that performed negligent inspections or repairs.
  • The manufacturer or installer of a defectively designed or built elevator or component, analyzed under product-liability principles.
  • A modernization contractor whose faulty work introduced the defect.

What an injured passenger generally must prove

A claim typically requires showing that the responsible party owed a duty, that it failed to use the required care over a defect it knew about or should have discovered, and that this failure caused the injury. The standard personal-injury filing deadline in Georgia is two years under O.C.G.A. § 9-3-33, though claims against a manufacturer can involve separate timing rules.

The bottom line

Liability for an elevator injury in Georgia centers on the building owner because of the non-delegable extraordinary-care duty, but the owner is liable only if a discoverable or known defect went unaddressed. Maintenance companies and manufacturers can share responsibility, and the apportionment statute splits the blame to match what each one’s negligence added to the malfunction.

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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