Recently, a New York appellate court found an employer liable for an employee’s injuries that arose from an off-site “happy hour” event.1
The injured employee,2 Bruce A. Matter, was an account executive for Google. He was struck by two motorized bicycles while crossing a street to get to a bus stop to go home after an “invitation-only”3 event, a “SADA & Google Cloud—Happy Hour,” at a local biergarten for the “Google Cloud NYC team.”
At the trial, Google’s representative explained that the purpose of such events is to develop and maintain business relationships between Google’s sales team and business partners, which, in turn, allows a better understanding of different strategies that may be pursued for sales purposes.
The Court reasoned that in order for an injury to be compensable under the New York Workers’ Compensation Law, the injury “must arise both out of and in the course of employment,” which means that injuries sustained during work must be related to the performance of one’s job duties. While “[g]enerally, accidents that occur outside of work hours and in public areas away from the workplace are not compensable,” if “there is a causal nexus between the accident and employment,” those injuries will be compensable under the law.
The Court found that a link between the accident and Matter’s employment was supported by substantial evidence, acknowledging the informal nature of the happy hour, but finding that Google clearly derived a benefit from its employee’s participation in the event by the development and maintenance of business relationships that generated increased sales and revenue. The Court also found that the employee’s attendance at the happy hour “altered the usual geographical or temporal scheme of travel, thereby altering the risks to which [he was] usually exposed.”
Employers should be aware that any events (including happy hours) that benefit them, where employees are encouraged to attend, may lead to not only workers’ compensation claims by injured employees, but also may lead to claims by third parties that have been injured by employees attending such events.
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- Matter v. Google Inc., No. CV-23-0719, 2024 N.Y. App. Div. LEXIS 4814 (3d Dept. 2024). ↩︎
- The injuries were reported to be “traumatic brain injury, was diagnosed with vertigo, and injured in his left shoulder, left knee, right elbow, left lung, four ribs, and both eyes.” ↩︎
- Matter, 2024 N.Y. App. Div. LEXIS 4814, at *1. ↩︎