Warranty & Damages

Our law firm competently represents you in all warranty and damages disputes.

Sowohl Gewährleistungs- als auch Schadenersatzrecht wirken auf den ersten Blick sehr einfach, haben aber zahlreiche rechtliche Tücken. Zudem existiert eine Vielzahl von Rechtsprechung, die den eigentlich recht kurzen Gesetzestext in verschiedene Richtungen interpretiert und auslegt.

Warranty

You are undoubtedly familiar with the problem yourself: A customer calls you, utterly furious, claiming various defects in your service, refusing to pay your service fee (in full), and demanding free rectifications from you.

While such situations are vexing and severely disrupt daily operations, as an entrepreneur, one should never accept such demands without examination.

If you provide services for remuneration (for example, within the scope of a contract for work), you automatically become subject to warranty obligations. Your liability under warranty is independent of fault. Thus, you cannot circumvent warranty law with the excuse “it’s not my fault at all”.

Within the scope of your warranty obligation, there is the possibility of rectification, completion of missing parts, or replacement. Your customer therefore generally has no right to immediately demand a reduction in the service fee or to declare withdrawal from the contract. If you fulfill your obligations, you are generally entitled to the full service fee.

If both rectification and replacement are impossible, or involve disproportionately high effort for you, your customer has the right to demand a reduction in the service fee or – provided it is not a minor defect – the dissolution of the contract (= rescission). This also applies if you refuse rectification or replacement, do not carry them out within a reasonable period, if they are associated with significant inconvenience for your customer, or are unreasonable for your customer due to reasons attributable to you.

Damages

Another scenario: Your service is flawless (and therefore free of defects under warranty law), however, you make a mistake and damage your customer’s property. In this case, fault is attributable to you – liability under warranty law is excluded. Rather, your customer is entitled to damages.

The legal prerequisites for a claim for damages are:

• Damage

• Unlawfulness

• Causation

• Fault.

If even one of these prerequisites is missing, no claim for damages exists.

Damage

The law defines damage as a “disadvantage inflicted upon someone’s assets, rights, or person”. This concept of damage is broadly defined and encompasses not only tangible, material damages (“destroyed tile”) and non-material damages (“injury to honor”) but also any health impairments, both physical and psychological.

Unlawfulness

The damage must be unlawful. The unlawfulness of the damage is always excluded where grounds for justification exist. One of the most central grounds for justification is self-defense. This exists when the acting party only uses the defense necessary to avert a present or immediately impending unlawful attack on their own or another’s life, health, physical integrity, freedom, or property.

If these prerequisites are met, a claim for damages is excluded – regardless of whether damage occurred – due to a lack of unlawfulness.

Causation

Unlawful damage can only be attributed to the person whose actions were causal for the occurrence of the damage – in other words: who caused the damage. It is only too understandable that you might now shrug your shoulders and think: “These lawyers – surely it’s always clear who caused the damage…”.

Practice shows that this is not the case. Especially in larger construction projects, there are often bitter disputes in court over who allegedly caused which damage.

Fault

The most central prerequisite for a claim for damages is fault. This is divided into intent and negligence, with the latter further subdivided into slight and gross negligence. While intent – colloquially speaking – can be understood as “deliberate” harm (and thus will generally not be relevant for the average entrepreneur in practice), negligent conduct is commonplace, especially in the construction industry.

Slight negligence refers to actions where the required diligence was disregarded, but which could also happen to a diligent person in a comparable situation. Whereas gross negligence begins where this is no longer the case.

This distinction is of central importance for the scope of the claim for compensation. This is lower for slight negligence than for gross negligence, and lower for gross negligence than for intent.

Is everything clear?

Have you lost track? No wonder. Both warranty law and damages law appear very simple at first glance, but they contain numerous legal pitfalls. Furthermore, there is a wealth of jurisprudence that interprets and construes the actually quite brief legal text in various ways.

The Sooner, the Better

You can minimize your liability risk in advance. Do you have protection through:

• professionally drafted (not self-copied from the internet) General Terms and Conditions (GTC)?
• professional contracts with customers, suppliers, and cooperation partners
• professional employment contracts?
• a limited liability company (GmbH)?

If you have to answer even one of these questions with a yes-and-no, no, maybe, no idea, etc., it is high time to contact us.

Legal Certainty through Advice

We are your competent partner in all facets of liability law and are always by your side, from the initial consultation to representation in court. Due to our many years of technical experience, we are particularly the right choice for companies in the construction industry.

Select Your Preferred Appointment Now:Free initial consultation