$887,000 Settlement After Washington Supreme Court Ends Contractor Shield in Fatal Excavation Case

In December 2000, Alan Davis was the foreman of a crew at an industrial processing facility near Seattle, sent into a trench to locate a leak in a buried high-density polyethylene pipe. While Davis was in the excavation, cement blocks lining the pit collapsed. He died at the scene.

The pipe had been installed years earlier by Baugh Industrial Contractors, Inc. under a contract that concluded in 1997 when the property owner formally accepted the work. When Davis's estate sued Baugh for negligent construction, the King County Superior Court granted summary judgment for the contractor. The basis was Washington's 'completion and acceptance' doctrine, a common-law rule holding that once a property owner accepts a contractor's finished work, the contractor is insulated from any future negligence claims, regardless of how the work was performed.

Scott Lundberg, serving as co-counsel for the Davis estate, helped bring the case to the Washington Supreme Court. The court took the appeal as an opportunity to reexamine a doctrine that had already been abandoned by 37 other states. In a January 2007 opinion, the court ruled unanimously that the completion and acceptance doctrine was outmoded and inconsistent with modern negligence principles. It adopted the Restatement of Torts approach instead, holding that a contractor remains liable for foreseeable injuries to third parties caused by negligent work, even after the owner accepts the project.

The court reversed the summary judgment and sent the case back to King County for further proceedings. With liability no longer blocked by the old doctrine, the parties reached a settlement of $887,000.

The ruling had immediate practical reach beyond this case. By eliminating the completion and acceptance shield, the court put Washington contractors on the same footing as contractors in the overwhelming majority of states, where foreseeability of harm, not timing of project acceptance, determines the scope of liability.