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Is a restaurant liable for the resulting injuries if someone gets knocked off their after slipping on soup spillage?
This question sat at the centre of a years-long legal battle following an accident at one of Australia’s most prestigious private schools — Geelong Grammar.
Brett McGinnes, the school’s property manager, entered the school’s busy Dining Hall during peak lunch service in March 2016.The room was packed with hundreds of students collecting food, balancing trays, and moving between tables and the dishwasher area. As McGinnes crossed the floor — walking with crutches, having lost a leg in childhood — his left crutch suddenly skidded forward.
He slipped on what was later identified, by smell, as soup. The fall left him with serious spinal injuries, eventually requiring surgery.
While McGinnes’s workers’ compensation claim was accepted without dispute, what followed was far more complex: Victorian WorkCover sued catering and cleaning giant Spotless for reimbursement of over $1.1 million it paid out in benefits.
WorkCover alleged that Spotless was legally liable for McGinnes’s injuries because its cleaning systems were inadequate and had contributed to the accident.
Spotless, under two contracts with the school — one for catering and one for cleaning — was responsible for the dining hall’s cleanliness.
WorkCover’s case was that Spotless failed to implement any proper system of regular inspections during busy meal services. Instead, it claimed, Spotless relied on staff or students to report spills, adopting a reactive rather than proactive approach to a foreseeable hazard.
Given the obvious risk of spills in a self-service dining area catering to hundreds of students, WorkCover argued that more was required.
The trial judge agreed: Spotless was liable for failing to actively patrol the dining area for hazards during peak service times. Instead of regular inspections, Spotless’s system depended on staff being told about spills — a system that was, in the judge’s view, manifestly inadequate in the prevailing circumstances.
Spotless appealed, arguing that in the absence of evidence as to for how long the soup been these, it was impossible to say that the additional surveillance advocated for would have prevented the fall.
The appeal judges agreed. While there was no question spillages were a foreseeable risk the claimant bore the burden of proving that Spotless’s failure to conduct inspections actually caused the accident.
It was not open to infer, based on the circumstances alone, that Spotless’s system had failed to prevent an avoidable accident. The soup may have been on the floor for several minutes — or it may have been spilled only seconds earlier.
In the absence of evidence the spill was there long enough for a reasonable inspection system would have identified it and had it cleaned up before McGinnes slipped, WorkCover’s case collapsed.
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