New York: Employer Faces No Tort Liability Following Holiday Party Fatality

An employer and various co-employees could not be held responsible in tort following the death of a co-employee who became intoxicated at a holiday party organized by a number of the co-employees, but not sponsored to any degree by the employer, held a New York appellate court. Co-employees of the deceased employee contacted the employee’s spouse, indicating the employee was in no shape to make it home on his own. The spouse, who was also an employee of the employer—and a nurse—arrived in her car and, with the help of various co-employees, got her inebriated husband into the car. When she arrived home, she determined to let him sleep it off in the car. Later, she found him slumped over dead in the floorboard of the auto. The appellate court agreed that the action of the co-employees was not the proximate cause of the decedent’s death.

Thomas A. Robinson, J.D., the Feature National Columnist for the LexisNexis Workers’ Compensation eNewsletter, is the co-author of Larson’s Workers’ Compensation Law (LexisNexis).

LexisNexis Online Subscribers: Citations below link to Lexis Advance.

See Gillern v. Mahoney, 2017 N.Y. App. Div. LEXIS 7069 (1st Dept., Oct. 5, 2017)

See generally Larson’s Workers’ Compensation Law, § 22.04.

Source: Larson’s Workers’ Compensation Law, the nation’s leading authority on workers’ compensation law

For a more detailed discussion of the case, see