Event Safety Insights Issue One | Fall 2016 | Page 35

another way, a venue or event professional
who understands the risks of a general admission crowd or ominous skies is more likely to
make reasonable decisions, meaning decisions
based on established criteria, subject matter
expertise, and calm deliberation – in short,
having a good reason. Right?

Informed Decisions, Effective
Actions
When you have more information and are
more sensitive to its significance, you will tend
to recognize life safety risks and move people
out of harm’s way sooner. You will activate your
emergency plan based on criteria you defined
on a quiet day when you had time to think
clearly, rather than “going with your gut” in the
middle of a chaotic command center as your
event goes wrong. You will post more or better-positioned event staff. You will have private
meteorologists giving you accurate, current information specific to your site. You will do your
job, and only yours, safe in the knowledge that
other people in the incident command structure are diligently plugging away at tasks within
their expertise. This is how you avoid litigation
in the first place and, if something does happen despite your best efforts, how you make it
easier for a guy like me to defend your actions.

A reasonable person continues to learn their
craft until they are done practicing it. This is why
we attend and teach at countless summits and
conferences and academies every year: to do
better and to become smarter.
It is important to be smart about your job in this
industry, not merely because you will be easier
for some lawyer to defend in court, but also because you may one day save a life.
And isn’t that a great reason not to be dumb?
Steven A. Adelman is the head of Adelman Law
Group, PLLC in Scottsdale, Arizona, and Vice
President of the Event Safety Alliance. He can
be reached at sadelman@adelmanlawgroup.
com.

In the interest of completeness, let’s briefly consider the fate of someone who should
know better but either actively or passively allows unsafe things to happen on their watch.
It is my observation that even well-meaning
people make mistakes all the time. When those
mistakes don’t cause any harm, they should
yield nothing more than the relieved recognition of a teachable moment. Because we are
all fallible, the only indefensible person is one
who repeatedly makes the same mistakes with
no apparent recognition of a problem. The law
takes a particularly dim view of such people.
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