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Service of Alcohol

Legal Guidelines for Serving Alcohol at Events

In this video, you’ll learn what to look out for when serving alcohol at meetings and events. You’ll get an understanding of what a group’s risk level is and how it interferes with the hotel’s risk level, the concept of a “social host”, and things you can do to manage risk when serving alcohol at your event.

Experts

Barbara Dunn (representing Groups) Partner at Barnes & Thornburg, LLP

Lisa Sommer Devlin (representing Hotels) Devlin Law Firm, P.C.

Overview

  • For many organizations the ability to host receptions and dinners and other functions is important to their goals to networking, to socializing etc. And alcohol plays a component in that for many groups.

Group Perspective

  • It’s important to understand what the group’s risk level is when it comes to service of alcohol and how that risk level interfaces with the hotel’s responsibility as a liquor license holder.
  • The requirements for licensing vary significantly. But suffice it to say if you’re working with a restaurant on a private event or a hotel or a caterer for an offsite event, certainly, that individual that company needs to have a liquor license in order to serve or sell alcohol.
  • There is a concept as well known as “Social Host”, a social host in 32 states is actually a sponsor of an event at which alcohol is served. And either someone at that event is served that is under the age of 21 or is over served alcohol, that can trigger not only the liquor license holder to be responsible for that claim or anything bad that happens out of that but also the social host.
  • The fact of the matter is that serving alcohol and driving and even not driving can cause situations and concern and risk. So, it is important to manage that risk.
  • There’s a lot of things you can do to manage risk. Certainly, all the practical things that groups can do to make sure someone doesn’t drink too much.
    • For example: Closing the bar during dinner or having one free ticket and otherwise people have to pay for drinks.
  • Indemnification can be important. Liquor license holders are trained. They have to have a certain requisite level of insurance to sell. And if the hotel or caterer was negligent and over serving someone or not checking an ID for someone, that could trigger an indemnification obligation on the hotel’s part.
  • Groups need to think about general liability insurance. Most policies exclude liquor claims coverage. So you will want to discuss with your insurance broker and ask to get that coverage. Typically, that’s known as a rider or an endorsement to get covered for liquor liability claims. And you do want coverage.
  • Yes, it’s expensive to have a hotel bartender in there to serve alcohol but you’re getting the benefit of their training.

Hotel Perspective

  • Advice to groups is don’t get involved in the service of alcohol. I mean that’s the secret bottom line. When you’re having an event, you should say that all alcohol will be served by the hotel. The hotel again has the license.
  • You shouldn’t have alcohol easily available at hospitality events or parties where people can serve themselves.
  • It used to be very common to have hospitality suites at big events where there would be a bar stocked and people would come and go. Those kinds of things have pretty much gone away because you don’t want to have a no-host bar situation. Both the hotel and the group could be held responsible if people can serve themselves alcohol and then go out and cause some kind of an injury.
  • Keep in mind that it’s not just claims from people getting over-served and causing injury. You also have the potential problem in hospitality suites or other situations, where other kinds of things can happen like sexual assault.
  • You should always focus on having alcohol served by someone who has been trained.
  • The hotel has personnel trained to avoid potential claims and you should put that responsibility on them. Still have the insurance to cover it, but make sure that alcohol is being served by trained personnel.
  • It just means that they’ve been trained and there’s different kinds of trainings.
  • The hotel should only be responsible if they were directly involved in causing that person to be overserved.
  • Another thing to think about is in social events where people want to bring in their own alcohol. There are lots of bad cases out there where somebody gets intoxicated and causes injury and everybody gets sued.
  • So, the best thing to do is to ensure that you always have alcohol being served by someone who’s been trained and licensed.