When a Security Company May Be Responsible for an Attack

If There Were Guards on Site: When a Security Company May Be Responsible

A security contractor is a separate business from the property owner. The owner controls the property. The contractor is hired to perform specific security work there. Each can have its own duty. The owner's duty comes from owning or controlling the premises. The contractor's duty comes from what it agreed to do and how it actually did it.

Responsibility in this setting usually runs through negligence, which means failing to use the care a reasonable person or business would use in the same situation. A negligence claim generally has four parts. Duty is a legal obligation to act with reasonable care toward someone. Breach is a failure to meet that obligation. Causation is the link between that failure and the harm. Damages are the losses the harm produced. Whether any of the four is met for a security company depends on the specific facts, and the existence of an attack does not by itself prove that anyone failed in a duty.

No single national rule governs these claims. State law controls them, and the rules on duty, fault, damages and filing deadlines differ from state to state. A national overview of negligent security claims shows how the owner's side of these cases works. This page focuses on the hired company.

For someone hurt at a guarded property, the guards' presence is neither proof that the company did its job nor proof that it failed. Who shares responsibility shapes which businesses a claim names, what evidence matters, and how losses may later be divided. A conversation with an attorney can help identify which parties may have owed a duty on the night of the attack.

What the Security Company Agreed to Cover, and How That Shapes a Claim

The written agreement between the property and the security company is usually the starting point for what the company took on. These agreements typically describe a scope of work: which posts guards staff, which hours they cover, whether they patrol or stay at a fixed post, what they check, and what procedures they follow when something goes wrong.

For an injured person, this means the time and place of the attack matter. A company hired to staff a front desk from evening to midnight stands in a different position than one hired to patrol a parking structure around the clock. If an attack happened at a place or time the company never agreed to cover, the question of breach looks different than if it happened at a post the company was paid to staff. The terms can expand what the company was required to do, or limit it.

Many security agreements also address indemnification, which is a promise by one party to cover certain losses or legal costs of the other. An indemnity clause can affect how responsibility and payment are divided between the owner and the contractor after a claim is brought. It does not by itself decide whether either one met its duty to the person who was hurt.

The contract-related records that usually come up include the security services agreement and any amendments, the scope-of-work pages, post orders (the written instructions for each guard position), invoices showing what hours were actually billed, and correspondence between the owner and the company about security concerns. An injured person rarely has these documents. They are generally held by the businesses involved.

When a Guard Was Absent or Did Not Respond: Training, Staffing, and Conduct

Beyond the contract, a claim against a security company tends to turn on what its people were prepared to do and what they actually did. Each of the following can bear on a claim against the contractor separately from any claim against the owner.

Training is the first. A claim may ask whether guards were trained for the risks at that kind of property, such as how to respond to a fight, a trespasser or a report of a weapon, and whether the training matched the post orders they were given.

Staffing is the second. The question is whether enough guards were deployed for the risk the company and the owner knew about or could foresee. A single guard covering a large complex with a history of violent incidents raises different questions than the same coverage at a property with no history at all. Whether a risk was foreseeable is a factual question that state law frames in its own way.

Conduct is the third. A guard's own act or omission can be a basis for the contractor's responsibility: leaving a post, failing to call police, ignoring a reported threat, or using force improperly. Whether a particular act or omission contributed to the harm depends on what happened and in what order. Claims also often compare what the company's written procedures required with what guards did that night.

This is often where what an injured person or family saw firsthand, such as an empty post or a guard who did not respond, connects to the legal questions. Relevant records often include training logs and certifications, post orders, guard schedules and sign-in sheets, daily activity reports, incident reports, dispatch and radio logs, surveillance footage, police reports and the names of witnesses who saw the guards before or during the attack. These cases frequently overlap with shooting claims and attacks at hotels, where guards are common.

Whether the Security Company Was Licensed: One State's Example

States regulate private security companies through their own licensing laws, and the requirements differ from state to state. Texas is used here only as one example. Its rules are Texas law, not the rule in every state, and the licensing law of the state where an attack happened is the law that governs there.

Texas's Private Security Act requires a license before a company can act as a guard company. Section 1702.102 of the Texas Occupations Code provides that "Unless the person holds a license as a security services contractor, a person may not: (1) act as an alarm systems company, armored car company, courier company, guard company, or locksmith company" (the section lists further activities as well). The same chapter defines a "security services contractor" as a person who performs the activities that section describes.

Other parts of the Texas chapter connect to questions an injured person may have, such as whether a guard had been screened, or whether an armed guard was authorized to carry a gun. The chapter requires the state department to conduct a criminal history check on each applicant for a license or security officer commission, and a security officer commission is the authorization that entitles a security officer to carry a firearm. It requires a company license holder to carry general liability insurance conditioned to pay damages the license holder becomes legally obligated to pay because of bodily injury caused by an event involving its officers, agents or employees in licensed activity. It also allows a civil penalty paid to the state of up to $10,000 per violation against an unlicensed person who violates the chapter, and against a person who contracts with or employs someone knowing that person lacks a required license or commission, on proof of at least 30 days' notice of those requirements.

In plain terms, the insurance rule means a licensed Texas company is expected to carry coverage tied to injuries involving its people, and the penalty is paid to the state rather than to an injured person. These are regulatory rules. Whether a company held the required license is a factual question, and whether a missing license bears on a negligence claim is answered by that state's own law. For someone weighing a claim, licensing status is one more fact to identify, and an attorney can help assess its weight.

How Blame Is Shared Between the Owner, the Security Company and the Attacker

When an attack involves a property owner, a security company and the person who committed it, the law has to decide how responsibility is shared. Some states use comparative fault, which divides responsibility by percentage among those whose conduct contributed to the harm and adjusts recovery accordingly. Others use contributory negligence, a stricter rule that can bar recovery when the injured person bears some share of fault. No single rule applies everywhere.

Texas calls its approach proportionate responsibility, and Chapter 33 of the Texas Civil Practice and Remedies Code is one state's example. Under section 33.003, the trier of fact, meaning the jury or judge deciding the facts, determines a percentage of responsibility for each claimant, each defendant, each settling person and each designated responsible third party. A responsible third party is someone alleged to have caused or contributed to the harm, whether or not that person is a defendant. The section does not allow a question about anyone's conduct to go to the jury without sufficient evidence to support it. Put simply, each business's share is measured separately, and blame cannot be assigned to someone without evidence behind it.

The attacker can be part of that division, even if no one knows who the attacker was. Under section 33.004, a defendant can ask the court to name an unknown attacker as a responsible third party. To do so, the defendant must allege in an answer filed not later than 60 days after its original answer that an unknown person committed a criminal act that caused the injury. The court shall grant leave when the conditions the section lists are met, including that the defendant has pleaded facts showing a reasonable probability the act was criminal. That person is called "John Doe" or "Jane Doe" until identified. After adequate time for discovery, a party may move to strike a designation, and the court shall grant it unless a defendant produces enough evidence to raise a genuine issue of fact about that person's responsibility. For an injured person, this means a security company may try to place part of the blame on the attacker, but only under these conditions.

The percentages carry consequences in Texas. Section 33.001 bars a claimant whose own percentage is greater than 50 percent. Section 33.012 reduces recovery by the claimant's own percentage and by the sum of any settlements. Section 33.015 addresses what happens between the businesses afterward: a jointly and severally liable defendant that pays more than its share has a right of contribution against the others. In everyday terms, that last rule mostly settles accounts among the companies rather than with the injured person. The chapter does not apply to some actions, including a claim for exemplary damages.

A share of blame assigned to the attacker, to the injured person, or to another business can change what any one company may owe. Other states' frameworks may look nothing like this one, and an attorney can help explain how fault would be weighed under the governing state's rules.

If Both the Owner and the Security Company Fell Short: What Each Claim Decides

Showing that a security company fell short does not settle the property owner's position, and the reverse is also true. The two rest on related but different theories.

The owner's side is usually premises liability, the duty of someone who owns or controls property to use reasonable care to keep it reasonably safe for the people lawfully there, including against crime risks the owner could foresee. The elements a premises claim generally involves are set out in the negligent security requirements overview. The contractor's side is negligence in performing the security services it was hired to provide. An owner might have ignored repeated reports of break-ins, broken gates or dark stairwells. A contractor might have staffed a post poorly or trained guards badly. Either, both or neither may be shown, and the facts that matter for one are not always the facts that matter for the other.

The two threads also connect. In Texas, the chapter discussed above assigns a percentage to each defendant separately. An indemnity clause in the security contract may shift costs between the two businesses. Whether either or both may be responsible depends on what happened, who controlled what, and the law of the state where the attack took place. The overview of an inadequate security lawsuit covers how these claims are built more broadly.

For someone recovering from an attack, or a family handling things after a death, it can help to see the claim as a set of separate questions: which business owed what, what each knew, and which records exist for each. If you would like to talk through those questions as they apply to what happened, you can request a case evaluation with our attorney.