FROM THE RECORD

Cases that were decided. Read the file.

Every page in this series is a real decision: a court opinion or an administrative ruling, cited so you can check it yourself. Each one turns on a record the employer did not have, or had and did not act on. We show you what the deciding body relied on, which deployment produces that record, and what that deployment does not fix. Two rules hold across every entry. No causation claim. We do not tell you a verdict would have gone differently. We tell you which record the judge relied on, and which record the deployment produces. No client. None of these companies has ever worked with Precision Command. Their failures are public record. The fixes are ours.

FROM THE RECORD · 01

The driver they cleared anyway

Dougherty Equipment Co. v. Roper, 327 Ga. App. 434 (Ga. Ct. App. 2014). Appeal from the denial of the employer's motion for summary judgment on a negligent entrustment claim. Affirmed. A former employee and on-call technician was issued a company van. He was driving it to work when he collided with another driver's vehicle. The injured driver sued the company two ways: vicariously for the driver's negligence, and directly for negligent entrustment. What the record showed. When the company hired him, it knew his license had been suspended for a 2004 DUI. The company prohibited him from driving a company vehicle, or even his own vehicle, for any business purpose. In February 2007 he received a restricted driving permit. In March 2007, before clearing him to drive again, the company obtained his motor vehicle record. That record showed a 2004 failure to maintain lane conviction and carried the notation "Limited Permit 2DUI." The company cleared him anyway. What decided it. The Court of Appeals held the notation was "clearly sufficient to create an inference for summary judgment purposes" that the company knew the driver had more than one DUI, counting the 2004 conviction and an earlier one in the late 1990s. On that basis: "there is a question of fact on the issue of negligent entrustment." The case went to a jury. The vicarious claim did not survive. Because the driver was commuting, the coming-and-going rule rebutted the presumption that he was acting within the scope of his employment, even as an on-call technician with a company van. The only theory left standing was the one about the employer's own conduct. The record this deployment produces. Fleet Command. A signed, dated Driver Qualification File for every driver. A documented annual motor vehicle record review. A binary vehicle-use policy, signed and filed. An Early Warning System that forces a documented 72-hour review of every violation and every record notation, with an escalation threshold that is enforced rather than remembered. The honest limit. This was not a company that failed to check. It checked, read a two-DUI notation, and cleared the driver to a company van. No documentation system fixes a manager who decides to do that. What a system does is make the decision visible, documented and owned, and make the review happen at all rather than by memory. Documentation cuts both ways. A system that records knowledge and then does nothing with it produces the exact fact pattern that put this case in front of a jury. A note on state law. Georgia requires actual knowledge, not constructive knowledge, to support negligent entrustment. In Georgia, "we never checked" is closer to a defense than to liability. States that permit constructive knowledge treat the failure to check as the exposure itself. The review discipline matters in both, for different reasons.

FROM THE RECORD · 02

The policy nobody followed

Secretary of Labor v. a heavy civil contractor, OSHRC Docket No. 22-0300 (ALJ Decision and Order, Feb. 6, 2024). Administrative decision of an administrative law judge on a general duty clause citation, not a court opinion. Citation affirmed as a serious violation. Penalty assessed: $11,747. On August 23, 2021, an excavator bucket detached from its coupler. An employee was killed. The cited condition was a serious violation of Section 5(a)(1) of the Occupational Safety and Health Act: employees exposed to struck-by and crushing hazards from the unexpected release of a Paladin 54 inch excavator bucket from a Paladin JRB PowerLatch EX Coupler. The company argued unpreventable employee misconduct. That defense requires four elements: work rules designed to prevent the violation, adequate communication of those rules, steps taken to discover violations, and the element that decided this case, effective enforcement of those rules when violations were detected. What the record showed. The company had a progressive discipline policy in force. A verbal warning at the first violation, a written warning at the second, discharge at the third. The policy required every warning and proposed solution to be documented and placed in the personnel file, and required the division general superintendent to be advised before any disciplinary action. The site foreman did not follow it. The decision records that he "observed [employee] failing to conduct a ground test more than once but did not formally or progressively discipline him. Instead, he only yelled at [employee] and did not document the events in [employee]'s employment file." It adds: he "admitted he only issued verbal reprimands, and he was entirely unaware of [the company]'s policy requiring documentation of all disciplinary actions, including verbal warnings." The record also shows he had corrected the same behavior before, including yelling at the operator on two prior occasions for operating an excavator with an improperly attached bucket. A superintendent testified that although the company had a progressive discipline policy, "discipline could be left to the discretion of management, and not every mistake would result in the employee being written up." What decided it. The judge connected the failure to enforce directly to the hazard: "Failure to progressively discipline [employee] for repeated failures to perform ground tests after attaching an excavator bucket, and failure to clearly communicate to employees that elevated excavator buckets should be avoided as suspended loads, may have directly contributed to this hazardous condition and accident." The company also failed on communication. The decision states: "The Court declines to find that [the company] had a rule that suspended loads included bucket excavators," and that it was "not clear that employees were trained to include excavator buckets in that category." The defense failed. The citation was affirmed as serious and $11,747 was assessed. The record this deployment produces. Policy & Personnel Command. A Progressive Discipline Matrix that is mandatory rather than discretionary, so the response to a violation is identical whether the supervisor is strict or lenient. A written corrective action for every violation including verbal warnings, filed the day it happens. A named supervisor of record for each action. A 24-hour written-file standard, so a verbal correction cannot quietly evaporate. The second half of this case closes with Training Command: task-specific training with competency sign-off, so employees are trained that an elevated excavator bucket counts as a suspended load, plus equipment qualification covering attachments and couplers. The honest limit. The citation was not for missing paperwork. It was for a hazard: a bucket in the air over a man. The undocumented discipline did not create that hazard. It removed the company's defense when the hazard was already there. Read this case as proof of what an unexecuted policy costs in a hearing, not as proof that paperwork prevents deaths. And the edge cuts again. This company had the policy, the form, the escalation ladder and the sign-off requirement. What it did not have was a mechanism that made the supervisor follow it and made the record exist whether or not he felt like writing it. A policy on a shelf is not a system. A policy that produces a filed record, with a name on it, within 24 hours, is. Scale note. This employer is a large heavy civil contractor, not a 20 to 150 employee service fleet. The principle transfers. The scale does not. We state that on the page rather than let a reader discover it.

FROM THE RECORD · 03

The record that was never kept

CGL Facility Management, LLC v. Wiley, 328 Ga. App. 727, 760 S.E.2d 251 (Ga. Ct. App. 2014). Appeal from a trial court's rulings on summary judgment. The court affirmed the denial of summary judgment on negligent entrustment, so that claim went to a jury. It reversed on negligent training and maintenance. An employee of a facility-maintenance company crossed the center line in his employer's pickup truck and hit another driver's car head-on. The other driver died. The employee's blood tested positive for methamphetamine. What the record showed. The company ran a motor vehicle report on new hires, "but after that first report it relied on its insurer to monitor its employees' driving records." It "relied on its employees to self-report any subsequent arrests or tickets." The employee's license had been suspended in 1989 after his third conviction for driving under the influence. Years into the job he was demoted after an audit found deficiencies. He was allowed to keep the company truck. Although, in the court's words, "typically when an employee was demoted his file contained related paperwork, there was no documentation about that in [the employee's] file." The human resources director testified that the employee's personnel file "contained no record of any pre-employment screening," although company policy was to run an MVR on every prospective hire. What decided it. The company's own policy to run an MVR on every new hire, together with testimony that screening took place, "creates a question of fact as to whether CGL had actual knowledge of [the employee's] pattern of driving while impaired." The empty personnel file meant the company could not show what it had seen or decided. A jury had to resolve it. The record this deployment produces. Fleet Command. A Driver Qualification File holding the hire MVR and the decision made on it. A documented annual motor vehicle record review, in place of reliance on an insurer and on self-reporting. An annual driver re-evaluation tied to status changes such as a demotion or a change of vehicle assignment. The honest limit. A documented MVR review creates actual knowledge. That is the fact that put the employer in Entry 01 in front of a jury: it pulled the record and cleared the driver anyway. A file protects the company only when it pairs with a written disqualification standard that someone applies. No document fixes a driver using methamphetamine on his way to work. The employer also won on respondeat superior, because he was commuting, so the claim reached a jury on entrustment alone. The opinion states no dollar amount and the final outcome at trial has not been traced.

The pattern in all three cases

The policy existed. Nobody executed it. One company pulled the motor vehicle record and cleared the driver anyway. One wrote a discipline ladder and let the foreman yell instead of documenting. One ran a record at hire, then never looked again and left a demotion undocumented. In all three, the governing document was on the shelf, and the missing enforced record is what put the employer on the wrong side of the finding. Anyone can write a policy. The product is execution that leaves a record with a name on it.