If a business’s employee assaulted you, you can sue the company itself, not just the individual who hit you, but only if you can connect the attack to something the employer did wrong. Suing a company after their employee assaults you usually comes down to proving negligent hiring, negligent retention, or negligent supervision, and sometimes to showing the employee was acting within the scope of their job when the violence happened. The strength of your case often depends on steps you take in the first day or two, long before you file anything.
The First 48 Hours
Get medical attention the same day, even if you feel okay. A doctor’s evaluation creates a timestamped record linking your physical condition to the incident. Concussions, soft tissue injuries, and stress symptoms often don’t fully surface for hours or days, and an initial exam makes it much harder for the business to later argue your injuries came from something else.
Call the police and file a report. That gives you an independent, third-party account of what happened. Officers may interview witnesses on the spot and document details you’re too shaken to notice. Keep the report number.
Then report the incident to the business’s management. Get the full name and title of whoever you speak with, and ask for a copy of any incident report they create. If customers or employees saw what happened, collect their names and contact information before you leave. Witnesses who seem willing to help in the moment get hard to track down weeks later.
Preserve the Surveillance Footage
Most businesses with security cameras record on a loop, and footage can be overwritten in as little as a few days. If you wait until litigation to request the video, it may already be gone. An attorney can send a preservation letter (sometimes called a spoliation letter) formally notifying the business of your potential claim and demanding they keep all recordings from the date of the incident. If the business destroys footage after receiving that letter, a court can impose sanctions, including instructing the jury that the missing evidence would have supported your version of events. This is one of the strongest reasons to call a lawyer within a day or two.
Legal Theories That Make the Employer Pay
A business doesn’t automatically owe you money because its employee hurt you. You need to connect the assault to something the employer did wrong. There are two broad paths: holding the employer responsible for the employee’s actions, or holding the employer responsible for its own negligence.
When the Employee Was Doing Their Job
Under a doctrine called respondeat superior, an employer is legally responsible for wrongful acts an employee commits within the scope of their job duties.1Legal Information Institute. Respondeat Superior The problem in assault cases is that punching a customer doesn’t look like anyone’s job description. Courts frequently find that a purely personal act of violence falls outside the scope of employment, which blocks this theory.
The exception matters. When an employee’s role involves confrontation or the authorized use of force, the calculus changes. A bar bouncer who injures a patron, a security guard who uses excessive force, or a collections employee who physically intimidates a debtor may all be acting in a gray area that courts treat as within the scope of employment. If the job placed the employee in the exact situation where violence occurred, respondeat superior stays on the table.
Negligent Hiring
This claim targets the decision to hire the person in the first place. If a reasonable background check would have revealed a history of violent offenses or other red flags making the employee unfit for the role, the employer can be liable for skipping that step. The classic example is hiring someone with assault convictions for a position involving close customer contact (a home repair technician or a caregiver) without any screening.
Negligent Retention
Negligent retention picks up where hiring leaves off. Even if the hiring decision was reasonable, keeping an employee on staff after learning about dangerous behavior creates fresh liability. If management received complaints that the employee was threatening customers or coworkers and did nothing, the inaction becomes the basis for the claim.
Negligent Supervision
This theory focuses on how the employer ran the workplace. Failing to supervise high-conflict areas, not providing de-escalation training for customer-facing employees, or lacking security where altercations are foreseeable can all qualify. The question is whether a reasonable employer would have taken steps that could have prevented the assault.
These negligence theories overlap, and most cases involve more than one. An employee with a violent past who was also poorly supervised gives you multiple angles, and that redundancy forces the employer to defend every link in the chain.
Proving the Employer’s Fault
Showing that the assault happened isn’t enough. You need evidence tying a specific employer failure to your injuries.
For negligent hiring, the key evidence is whatever a pre-employment background check would have revealed: the employee’s criminal record at the time of hire, prior civil lawsuits, or disciplinary records from previous jobs. Your attorney can often obtain these through discovery.
For negligent retention, the focus shifts to what management knew and when. Internal complaint records, prior incident reports involving the employee, and testimony from coworkers who flagged aggressive behavior all help establish that the employer had notice and chose to look the other way. Coworkers are often the strongest witnesses. People share details about their lives at work, and if the employee had a reputation for being volatile, colleagues usually knew about it.
For damages, keep thorough financial records from day one. Save every medical bill, pharmacy receipt, and therapy invoice. To prove lost income, gather pay stubs or earnings statements along with a letter from your employer confirming the days you missed. If your injuries require ongoing treatment or stop you from returning to your previous level of work, records documenting that trajectory become critical for calculating future losses.
If the Employee Is Criminally Charged
The criminal case against the employee and your civil lawsuit against the business are separate proceedings with different standards of proof. A conviction, though, can significantly strengthen your civil claim. In many jurisdictions, a guilty verdict prevents the defendant from re-arguing the underlying facts in civil court through a principle called collateral estoppel. If a jury already found beyond a reasonable doubt that the employee committed assault, you generally won’t need to re-prove that point.
An acquittal doesn’t necessarily sink your case either. Criminal cases require proof beyond a reasonable doubt, while civil cases use the lower preponderance of the evidence standard, essentially more likely than not. Someone found not guilty in criminal court can still be found liable in a civil lawsuit on the same facts.
Filing Deadlines
Every state sets a deadline for filing a personal injury lawsuit, and missing it almost always kills the claim regardless of how strong it is. Most states give you two years from the date of the assault, though roughly a dozen allow three years and a handful set the deadline at one year. Courts enforce these windows without sympathy for close calls.
One narrow exception exists in most states: the discovery rule. If an injury wasn’t apparent and you couldn’t reasonably have known about it at the time, the clock may start running from the date you discovered (or should have discovered) the injury. Courts apply this exception narrowly, and it rarely matters in assault cases where the victim knows they were hurt. It’s more relevant for injuries whose full extent takes time to emerge, like traumatic brain injuries diagnosed weeks later.
Minors generally get extra time. Most states pause the statute of limitations for victims under 18, with the clock starting when the minor turns 18. The specific extension varies by state. Either way, identifying your deadline early is one of the first things an attorney will do.
What You Can Recover
If your claim succeeds, compensation breaks into categories, each covering different kinds of harm.
Economic Damages
These reimburse your actual out-of-pocket losses. Medical expenses form the core: emergency room visits, surgeries, prescriptions, physical therapy, and any future care your injuries require. Lost wages cover the income you missed during recovery, calculated from your documented pay rate. If your injuries limit your future earning capacity, that projected loss is recoverable too.
Non-Economic Damages
These compensate for harm that doesn’t come with a receipt: physical pain, emotional distress, anxiety, loss of sleep, and the ways your injuries have diminished daily life. Courts weigh severity and permanence when setting these amounts. Some states cap non-economic damages; others leave the figure entirely to the jury.
Punitive Damages
Punitive damages aren’t about compensating you. They punish the employer for conduct that goes beyond ordinary negligence into something more reckless or deliberate. Courts typically require proof of willful and wanton misconduct before awarding them.2Legal Information Institute. Punitive Damages In practice, that might look like an employer who received multiple credible reports that an employee was physically threatening customers, documented the complaints in writing, and kept the employee on staff anyway. Punitive awards are uncommon, and many states cap them using either a fixed dollar limit or a ratio tied to compensatory damages.
Loss of Consortium
If the assault caused severe injuries, your spouse may have a separate claim for loss of consortium, which compensates for damage to the marital relationship, including companionship, emotional support, shared activities, and intimacy.3Legal Information Institute. Loss of Consortium Some states extend this right to parents of a severely injured minor child. Unmarried partners, siblings, and extended family members generally cannot bring consortium claims regardless of how close the relationship.
The Collateral Source Rule
If your health insurance covered some of your medical bills, the employer generally cannot use that fact to reduce what they owe you. Under the collateral source rule, compensation from your own insurance, disability benefits, or similar sources doesn’t offset the defendant’s liability.4Legal Information Institute. Collateral Source Rule Some states have modified this rule in recent years, but in its traditional form, the defendant pays the full amount of your damages regardless of what other sources have already paid.
Taxes on the Recovery
Damages for personal physical injuries or physical sickness are excluded from your gross income under federal tax law.5Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 26 USC 104 – Compensation for Injuries or Sickness That exclusion covers compensatory damages including medical expenses, lost wages, and pain and suffering, as long as the underlying claim is rooted in a physical injury. Emotional distress damages tied to the physical assault get the same treatment. Punitive damages, however, are always taxable as ordinary income.6Internal Revenue Service. Tax Implications of Settlements and Judgments If your settlement includes a punitive component, the way the agreement allocates proceeds among damage categories directly affects your tax bill, which is one area where careful drafting by your attorney can save real money.
Defenses to Expect
Expect the business to push back on multiple fronts. The most common defense in respondeat superior claims is that the employee was acting outside the scope of employment, turning the assault into a personal act the employer bears no responsibility for. For negligent hiring and retention claims, the employer will argue it had no reason to know the employee posed a danger, or that its screening and supervision were reasonable under the circumstances.
The employer may also argue you provoked the employee or contributed to the situation in a way that should reduce your recovery. Most states follow some form of comparative negligence, where your damages can be reduced in proportion to your share of fault. A handful of states still follow contributory negligence, where any fault on your part can bar recovery entirely. This is worth raising with your attorney early, especially if alcohol or a heated exchange preceded the assault.
Working With an Attorney
Personal injury attorneys handling assault cases almost universally work on contingency, taking a percentage of your recovery rather than charging hourly fees. The standard range runs from roughly one-third of the settlement if the case resolves before trial to around 40 percent if it goes to a verdict. You typically pay nothing upfront, and if you don’t recover anything, you don’t owe attorney fees.
Costs are separate from fees. Filing fees, expert witness charges, medical record retrieval, and deposition costs add up during litigation. Most contingency arrangements have the attorney advancing these costs and deducting them from your recovery at the end, but the specifics vary. Ask how costs are handled before you sign a retainer agreement.
Beyond courtroom skill, the value a lawyer adds in these cases is operational: sending a preservation letter for surveillance footage in the first 48 hours, identifying every viable theory of liability, running discovery to uncover the employee’s history, and structuring a settlement to minimize taxes. Each of those steps meaningfully changes what you walk away with.