Huge damage award - posted without comment

Campfire Time wrote:

laknox wrote:

That's terrible. Be interesting to see if any of the owners can be held personally responsible. IIRC, if there's any hint of negligence, it could pierce the veil of corp. liability protection, and open up the owners and managers to civil liability.

Lyle

I think you are right, but only in circumstances where they knowingly turned a blind eye which gives them a measure of responsibility. And then someone has to prove that. So many companies are LLCs now and I think that's how they are protected. It would be interesting if we had a lawyer here who could weigh in.

Lawyer here, and that's not how it works. Veil piercing has more to do with whether or not the corporate form was respected, not so much to do with the degree of negligence with respect to how the entity acted. So it would be more about whether the entity was inadequately capitalized, was set up as a sham or in furtherance of fraud or other wrongdoing, there was commingling of assets between the entity and owners or other failures to follow corp. formalities, etc.

If you could pierce the veil just because an entity or its employees acted negligently, it would gut the whole concept of limited liability.