Advisory Managing Legal Risk by Drafting a Reply to a Fact-Finding Inquiry and Defining the Scope of Industrial Accident Liability

1. The Client's Situation

The client received a request for a fact inquiry from the court in connection with a fatal accident that occurred at a construction site. The composition of the on-site personnel at the time of the accident, the position and scope of duties of each person, and the relationship of work command and supervision between the deceased and the on-site workers became points of contention. In particular, whether the deceased was an employee or an independent service business operator, and whether the accident occurred within the scope of the construction work, were factors that could have a significant impact on the future determination of legal responsibility. Accordingly, it was necessary to prepare a reply that organized the facts without distortion while minimizing legal misunderstanding.

Your Legal Team organized, step by step, the content of the work on the day of the accident, the working hours, the structure of personnel deployment, and the specific scope of duties of each person. We composed the draft reply so as to clearly distinguish between the scope of the transportation work performed by the deceased as an individual business operator and the limits of the command and supervision exercised by the on-site work team leader. In addition, we designed a fact-centered sentence structure so that it would objectively appear that the location and time of the accident were after the completion of the construction work and that no other on-site personnel were present. Overall, we excluded emotional and evaluative expressions and refined the wording from a legal risk perspective so that no unfavorable interpretation would arise in future criminal or administrative proceedings.

Through the fact-inquiry reply that systematically organized the facts, the client was able to respond to the investigative agency's questions sincerely and consistently. Since the deceased's legal status and scope of duties, as well as the distance between the accident and the construction work, were clearly revealed, the risk of an unnecessary expansion of employer liability could be managed in advance. As a result, the client laid the groundwork to substantially reduce the possibility of additional disputes arising from factual distortion in the future process of determining industrial accident and civil or criminal liability.