Duty vs Breach in Legal Cases: Understanding The Difference

attorney stands before court

Don’t confuse the elements of “duty” and “breach.” It can have significant implications for your case.

Most significantly, duty is a legal question for the court to resolve. Breach, on the other hand, is a factual question for the jury to decide.

Here’s a real-world example from a case I helped brief at my prior firm: Norfolk S. Ry. Co. v. Zeagler, 293 Ga. 582 (2013).

In Zeagler, Norfolk Southern argued it did not have a duty to train the plaintiff, a railroad conductor, on how to protect himself in a grade crossing collision. Unfortunately, numerous courts around the country had been led astray and held that a “duty to train” on this specific issue did not exist. The trial court granted summary judgment to the defendant.

But we re-framed the issue to correctly focus on breach. The duty to provide a reasonably safe place to work indisputably exists under the FELA. The question was whether that duty was breached in failing to provide this training, and we had evidence that it was a breach not to provide it.

Because we reframed the issue to focus correctly on breach, rather than duty, we prevailed at the Georgia Supreme Court and the trial court’s grant of summary judgment to the railroad was reversed.

If you encounter a defendant arguing that a particular duty does not exist, don’t accept their framing of the issue and engage on their turf. Ask yourself: Did they frame the issue correctly in the first place?

If a general duty exists, the issue is almost always whether the duty was breached, not whether some narrower duty to take some specific action exists.

What do you think? Join the conversation with me on LinkedIn.

About the Author

Darl Champion is an award-winning personal injury lawyer serving the greater Metro Atlanta area. He is passionate about ensuring his clients are fully compensated when they are harmed by someone’s negligence. Learn more about Darl here.