Liability For Wrongfully Towing Vehicle

[Stanley Bronstein]

I got an interesting phone call from an elderly client yesterday. 87 year old woman who regularly goes to the hairdresser every 2 weeks.

Hairdresser is located in a shopping center that's next door to a Mercedes dealership.

Evidently customers of the Mercedes dealership routinely park in the shopping center and the center's management company has warned the Mercedes dealership on multiple occasions.

My client drives a Mercedes.

My client goes in for an hour and gets her hair done. When she goes to leave, her car was gone ...

The security company (hired by the management company) had it towed.

To make matters worse, expensive Mercedes vehicles are supposed to be flat towed and they evidently towed it the routine way by hoisting up the rear.

Client was shaken up and all in all is not happy.

Security company has repeatedly apologized for their error (but hasn't offered to do anything about it).

Client is taking her vehicle to the Mercedes dealership to have it inspected to ascertain whether or not there was any damage.

I'm waiting to hear back as to the results of said inspection.

Obviously a lot of this depends on whether or not the client was damaged and if so, how much she was damaged.

My thoughts are the security company is definitely on the hook. The management company who hired them probably is too.

The Mercedes dealership might be to some extent, simply because it was their abuse (or their customer's abuse) of the parking lot that created the problem in the first place.

The hair salon probably is not on the hook because they didn't do the towing (although they could have possibly warned the client ahead of time and notified security to not have her towed).

I'd love to hear your thoughts as to the liability of the management company, the security company, the Mercedes dealership and the hair salon?

[Kevin Dougherty]

Obviously the management company does not have the proper identification system to determine which vehicles are parked illegally on the property so the result was a legally parked vehicle was towed and the vehicle owner was inconvenienced. Since the jury is still out on any damages to the towed vehicle its an unknown issue. 

At fault to date is: Management company only - depending on its policy to determine that the vehicle is definitely parked illegally.

Hair Salon has no liability as its not responsible for parking issues, it seems extreme to ask the hair salon to notify their Mercedes Benz owning customers to park their vehicle elsewhere, unless they have had multiple Mercedes Benz owning clients whose vehicles were towed from the property. 

Mercedes Benz has no liability unless you can prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the Benz dealer created the issue by parking the dealership owned/controlled vehicles on the property. You stated the customers of the dealership were at fault and creating the issues. The dealership could put up warning signs to its customers as a courtesy to the customer. 

Towing company liability is: any damage they may have caused if they did not tow the vehicle properly and if they failed to follow the management company policy of identifying vehicles parked illegally on the property.

At minimum the management company could pay for your client's recent visit to her salon and maybe a future visit. Goodwill goes a long way.

*I am not an attorney nor do I play one on TV*