Invitee. The word sounds like a party. In Texas premises law it is the shopper, the hotel guest, the patient, the fan in the stands, the customer at the counter: anyone who comes onto someone else’s property with the owner’s knowledge and for the benefit of both. It names the widest promise an owner makes to anyone on his land, and the promise is the whole case.
The word. The Texas Supreme Court defines an invitee as one who enters the property of another “with the owner’s knowledge and for the mutual benefit of both” (Austin v. Kroger Texas). The benefit is usually money, yours to them, but the definition does not require a purchase, only the invitation and the shared reason for it. A hotel guest is one; when a woman sued a motel over a fall in her room’s shower, the motel did not dispute that as its guest she qualified (Motel 6 v. Lopez). Texas sorts the people on another’s land by why they are there. The social guest and the trespasser get narrower promises. The invitee gets the widest, because the owner asked.
The promise. “A landowner has a duty to exercise reasonable care to make the premises safe for invitees,” the court wrote in 2015, answering a question sent over by the federal appeals court, and it described that duty as one to make safe or warn against “any concealed, unreasonably dangerous conditions of which the landowner is, or reasonably should be, aware but the invitee is not” (Austin). Make safe or warn: ordinarily the owner need not do both, and an adequate warning satisfies the duty. That is why the wet-floor sign exists. To hold the owner to the promise, an invitee has to prove four things: that the owner had actual or constructive knowledge of some condition on the premises; that the condition posed an unreasonable risk of harm; that the owner did not exercise reasonable care to reduce or eliminate the risk; and that the failure proximately caused the injury (Keetch v. Kroger; CMH Homes v. Daenen). The second and third are usually plain once the first is settled. The first is the fight.
Knowledge. The owner does not have to know about the particular grape. He is charged with constructive knowledge of “any premises defects or other dangerous conditions that a reasonably careful inspection would reveal,” and the standard of care is the ordinary care a reasonably prudent person would use under all the circumstances (Corbin v. Safeway). Corbin slipped on a grape in a produce aisle, directly in front of a self-service grape bin, with no mat on the floor, and the court held that he was entitled to a jury: the store’s own employees had testified that green grapes in an open, slanted bin for customers to pick through posed an unusually high risk of falls from grapes dropped on the floor, the store admitted it knew that risk, and reasonable jurors could find the display itself unreasonably dangerous. The display method was the condition, and the store knew its own display. Nearly ten years later a Kroger customer slipped near the floral desk, on what she said was a slick spot left by the overspray of a plant product the store used, and the court drew two lines that still govern. A person hurt by an activity itself, as it happens, sues for the negligent activity; a person hurt by the condition the activity left behind, the overspray on the floor, sues for the premises condition, and that claim needs proof of knowledge (Keetch). And creating the condition may support an inference that the owner knew of it, but it does not establish knowledge as a matter of law unless the knowledge is uncontroverted. The owner is also not an insurer. When a step-and-platform unit at the supply shed of a mobile-home dealer grew unstable from heavy use and swayed from side to side under the man who stepped onto it, the court held that an owner “is not liable for deterioration of its premises unless it knew of or by reasonable inspection would have discovered the deterioration,” that many materials wear out over time without the owner having created a dangerous condition, and that premises owners are not strictly liable for conditions that result in injury (Daenen). The motel guest lost for the same reason: the courts found, and she did not dispute, that the motel did not know and should not have known of a dangerous condition in the shower, no one had ever complained of one, and a business cannot breach a duty it does not owe (Motel 6). So the invitee’s case is built on time and on looking: how long the condition was there, who should have seen it, and what a reasonable inspection would have found, which is what Notice is about.
The edge. The promise is about concealed dangers. When a hazard is open and obvious, or the invitee already knows it, the owner is in no better position to discover it than the invitee, and the court held in 2015 that a landowner generally has no duty to warn of such a hazard, because in most cases it no longer poses an unreasonable risk (Austin). Two exceptions survive. The first is the foreseeable criminal act of a third party: a resort whose bar let drunk, belligerent patrons square off long enough that it had, in the court’s words, actual and direct knowledge that a violent brawl was imminent and ample time and means to defuse it, and its duty did not end because the man who was hurt could see the danger too, since, as the court put it, knowing the danger was not enough to let him avoid it. The second is necessary use: a woman who fell on a dark, narrow, turning staircase that was the only way out of her sister’s apartment had done what she could, her sister holding a flashlight and careful steps, and the owner should have anticipated that she could not avoid the risk. Both exceptions matter most in the places that invite the public in for the night, which is what Smoke said about a hotel.
The move. The owner’s knowledge is proved from the owner’s own records, and they do not wait. The video before it cycles over. The incident report written that day. The sweep log, the inspection schedule, the maintenance tickets and the prior complaints, which are the difference between a condition that just appeared and one that had been there. The names of the employees on the floor. The condition itself, photographed before it is mopped or repaired. The warning sign that was or was not there. Spoliation explains what happens when a business lets its own records go after it knows a claim is coming.
The invitee is the person the business asked in. The law holds the business to the care the invitation implied: look for what could hurt that person, and fix it or say so.
The rule: Austin v. Kroger Texas, L.P., 465 S.W.3d 193 (Tex. 2015) (the definition of an invitee; the duty to make safe or warn against concealed, unreasonably dangerous conditions; no duty to warn of open and obvious or known hazards; the criminal-activity and necessary-use exceptions, describing Del Lago Partners v. Smith and Parker v. Highland Park); Motel 6 G.P., Inc. v. Lopez, 929 S.W.2d 1 (Tex. 1996) (a motel guest is an invitee; no breach without knowledge); Corbin v. Safeway Stores, Inc., 648 S.W.2d 292 (Tex. 1983) (constructive knowledge of what a reasonably careful inspection would reveal; the self-service grape display as the condition); Keetch v. Kroger Co., 845 S.W.2d 262 (Tex. 1992) (negligent activity against premises condition; the four elements; creating the condition does not establish knowledge as a matter of law); CMH Homes, Inc. v. Daenen, 15 S.W.3d 97 (Tex. 2000) (no liability for deterioration the owner did not know of or would not have found by reasonable inspection; premises owners not strictly liable). General information, not legal advice.
