Can I sue a speaker?

Technically you can, but reality is that it's time consuming and could be cost prohibitive.

After talking to an insurance company about the usual yearly policy update of professional indemnity, I was horrified to learn that many speakers are actually leaving themselves open to not being professionally covered with an adequate insurance policy when they give a presentation.

This means that should they say something that you or a member of your audience then acts upon and it is advice that is detrimental, the speaker is not covered should they be sued.

What does this mean to you?  As an event organiser, you probably think that it's all down to the speaker and nothing to do with you.  But you'd be wrong.  If you have no proper contract in place with them, a clever legal bod could construe that they are a part of your team and as such, you would be libel for their mistake.

But we all rely on that one tough question of "proving the fact" as being the main reason why things don't go too much further as usually this is cost prohibitive.   However, what if it could be proved?  If it could be proved that what they said on your stage was the result of someone suffering from their bad advice, could your organisation be picking up the cost especially if you haven't done the basics?

And it's not just their advice that could be putting you at risk but also their behaviour and attitude.

Take the case of the speaker I mentioned in my earlier blog - the one who was chatting up members of the audience to go home with him.  Because there was no contract in place and the speaker was there as a 'promotion' for the event rather than being a paid professional, he was acting as one of the company's ambassadors - on their behalf.  And because he was there on their behalf, his behaviour of chatting up and making sexual references towards the guests could have landed the company in trouble should one of the guests taken offence and issued a formal complaint.  Had things taken a turn for the worse, the company could do very little towards the speaker as there was no contract, no clear definition of the working relationship and therefore trying to counter sue him would be again, cost prohibitive.

In today's audience experience, I recently listened to someone muttering behind me that they wanted to sue the organiser for having speakers who were not providing the content they were led to believe. Words like 'mis-reperesentation', 'taking money under false pretences' and 'false advertising' were being quietly bounced between her and her colleague.  Whether she will or not, I have no idea, but she did raise an interesting point: who was at fault - the speaker or the organiser?  And who would she sue for poor content / poor experience of the ticketed event - the speaker or the organiser?

After all, if  Paul 'Gazza' Gascoigne, can be sued after an audience member complained about his inappropriate comment towards someone else, then the floodgates could start to be opened for more actions to be brought against comedians, after dinner speakers, professional speakers and the friend of a friend of the CEO who's just graced your stage as a favour.....

Most professional speakers have professional indemnity insurance and issue you with terms and conditions.  If you are working with people who are not professional, by that I mean they have a day job and speak because of a passion, or it's related to their job role or they've been asked by the friend of the friend of the CEO, they probably won't have terms and conditions and it's also likely to follow that their insurance might not be adequately covering them when they give information from the stage.

Your process must include a means to guard yourself and your organisation against that 1 speaker in every 100 who will bring your organisation into disrepute - you know the one I mean that traditionally makes the event organiser being put into the position to take the fall and find a new job.

We think it's unfair and unjust and why there needs to be a standard way of working with speakers to guard against this and raise the level of professionalism - that's why we built iwantaspeaker.com.  If you have your own process already - fantastic and I'd love to hear more.  Please do send me an email or comment below and let me know how you've headed off potential issues before they arisen too.   Thank you and l look forward to reading them.