Nobody uses a travel agent anymore. Employees book their own flights on an app, jump into a stranger’s car through another app, then answer emails from a hotel lobby at midnight. Somewhere in all that convenience sits an old, unglamorous legal idea: Duty of Care. What follows is a look at what that obligation really costs a company when nobody’s watching it — and what it takes to actually get it right.

The New Shape of Duty of Care

Duty of Care isn’t a bullet point on an HR slide. It’s a real legal standard, and judges have gone after employers who assumed a business trip stopped being their problem the second the employee left the building. A sales rep crashes driving to a client meeting. A consultant gets hurt in a hotel parking lot after a company dinner ran late. Either way, the employer’s name can end up on the lawsuit.

That risk runs especially high in Los Angeles, a city where business travelers log more freeway miles than almost anywhere else in the country. A work trip ends in a wreck on the 405, and suddenly the injured employee needs a lawyer, fast. The statute of limitations doesn’t pause for an internal HR review to wrap up. Usually, a Los Angeles Personal Injury Lawyer gets a call before the company’s own legal team has even finished the incident report.

Here’s what travel managers keep getting wrong: Duty of Care doesn’t stop at the airport gate. It follows the employee to the rental counter, into the rideshare, up to the hotel room, and back home. ISO 31030:2021 — the international standard for travel risk management — lays this out in plain terms, and more legal departments are adopting it quietly. Not because a regulator told them to. Because plaintiffs’ attorneys already know the standard exists, and they will absolutely cite it in a filing.

Where Employer Liability Actually Begins and Ends

So where’s the actual line? Ask five general counsels and there’s a good chance you get five different answers. The “course and scope of employment” test shifts by state, by fact pattern, by judge, honestly. California courts in particular have leaned toward broader employer responsibility than most companies expect walking in.

A few scenarios worth thinking through:

• An employee drives to the airport for a mandatory conference and gets into an accident. Covered under workers’ compensation, pretty much across the board.
• That same employee takes a personal detour first, then crashes. Now it’s murky, and companies lose this argument more often than not, because the “special errand” doctrine still applies as long as the trip’s main purpose was business.
• An employee attends a company dinner, has a couple drinks the company paid for, then something happens on the drive home. Suddenly general liability, dram shop laws, and workers’ comp are all arguing over the same claim.

None of this is made up. Companies have landed in wrongful death suits tied to alcohol served at their own events. And the “going and coming rule,” which normally protects employers from ordinary commute accidents, has a long-standing exception for travel undertaken specifically for work.

The Financial Stakes Behind the Legal Question

Set the litigation costs aside for a moment. There’s a second bill coming, and it’s reputational. One lawsuit tied to an unsafe business trip can wipe out years of careful employer branding. Glassdoor reviews don’t forget. Neither does an attorney building a pattern-of-negligence case against a company that’s been sued before.

Practical Risk Management on the Road

None of this means canceling business travel or wrapping every employee in bubble wrap before a flight. It means writing a travel policy for how trips actually happen now — messy, half-planned on a phone at the gate, rarely following the itinerary anyone printed out.

Rethinking the Travel Policy

Most corporate travel policies were written for a world with fixed itineraries and a human travel agent booking every leg. That world’s gone. A policy that still holds up today needs to spell out:

• Which transportation options are pre-approved, including which rideshare or taxi apps actually qualify for reimbursement
• Mandatory check-in protocols for travel into higher-risk regions, often tracked through platforms like International SOS or Crisis24
• Where personal time ends and business purpose begins on a given trip, because that line decides which insurance pays
• Emergency contact chains that don’t rely on one exhausted travel manager checking email at 2 a.m.

Marriott built a dedicated crisis-response team. So did Deloitte. Ad hoc planning failed both of them during real emergencies, and the 2015 Paris attacks still get cited as the moment corporate security planning got serious across the industry.

Rideshare, Taxis, and the Question Nobody Wants to Answer

Uber and Lyft changed business travel logistics, and mostly for the better. But that convenience opened a liability gap most companies still haven’t closed. Picture this: an employee books a rideshare through a corporate account for a client meeting, and the driver causes a crash. Who’s responsible? The rideshare company? The driver? The business that authorized the trip in the first place?

Honestly, it depends — and that’s exactly why specialized counsel matters here. A rideshare accident lawyer Los Angeles firm brings in for these cases will dig into what insurance tier the rideshare company was carrying at the exact moment of the crash, since Uber and Lyft coverage changes depending on whether the driver was heading to a pickup, actively driving a passenger, or just logged in and waiting. Most corporate travel managers never learn this distinction matters until it’s sitting in a demand letter.

One fix that actually works: require trip-purpose documentation for every corporate rideshare booking, and check whether the general liability policy even mentions third-party transportation. Most don’t say a word about it. Not until someone forces the issue in court.

When Something Goes Wrong: The Incident Protocol

Skip the glossy crisis-management brochure for a second. What actually needs to happen in the first sixty minutes after a road incident involving a traveling employee?

1. Confirm medical needs first. Always. Before a single administrative step.
2. Notify the designated internal contact — not just the direct manager, who might be unreachable for hours.
3. Document the scene if the employee is physically able to: photos, the other driver’s information, the police report number.
4. Bring legal counsel in before anyone gives a statement to an insurance adjuster.
5. Hold onto every trip-related record — booking confirmations, expense reports, calendar invites that show business purpose.

That last one matters more than people think. In litigation, the paper trail proving a trip was work-related often decides who pays: workers’ comp, general liability, or the employee’s own auto insurance.

Building a Culture That Protects People and the Balance Sheet

Managing travel risk was never really about eliminating danger. That’s not realistic once people are driving unfamiliar roads and sleeping in unfamiliar cities. It’s about making sure the company’s response, its paperwork, and its insurance posture hold up when something goes sideways — because eventually, something will. Travel managers who treat Duty of Care like a box to check tend to find out, usually during a deposition, that boxes don’t survive cross-examination very well. The companies actually ahead of this problem are the ones asking the uncomfortable liability questions before the trip happens, not scrambling to answer them afterward.