Opinion ID: 2341935
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: We Decline to Extend Burden-Shifting Approach.

Text: Brewster argues that he was a business invitee to Jewish Hospital's and Colgate's premises and, as such, the burden-shifting approach adopted in Lanier should apply to him. While we recognize that some confusion may have resulted when we began our discussion by generally referring to customers as business invitees [19] in Lanier , we note that our holding there concerned shifting the burden from a customer to a business owner since we chose to impose a rebuttable presumption that shifts the burden of proving the absence of negligence, i.e., the exercise of reasonable care, to the party who invited the injured customer to its business premises. [20] We find no reason to extend Lanier to the context of the case at hand; and, in fact, we explicitly limit Lanier to cases involving customers or clients or patrons suffering slip and falls or other injuries resulting from dangerous conditions on a business owner's premises. And we note that other Kentucky reported cases following Lanier have also involved customers' slip-and-fall cases, [21] not injuries to other types of business invitees, such as independent contractors' employees. In cases like the case at hand, independent contractors' employees (unlike retail customers) will generally have another available remedy through workers compensation; and someone other than the premises ownertheir employer, the independent contractorowes them a duty to look after their safety. So we see no reason to extend the burden-shifting approach established in Lanier for customers' slip-and-fall claims to encompass the present context. Although, in some unfortunate situations, such as here, the worker might be unable to obtain workers' compensation benefits because of the running of the statute of limitations, we think that this issue might better be addressed through appropriate legislative action on limitations than through our court's extending a burden-shifting approach that might penalize premises owners who reasonably relied on their independent contractors' knowledge and duty to provide a safe workplace for their own employees. So we decline to extend Lanier to the present context.