Free South Carolina Liability Waiver Form

South Carolina will enforce a well written release, and it has done so for participants at a speedway and at a paintball range. It will also take a release apart sentence by sentence, because the settled rule here is that clauses of this kind tend to induce a want of care, so they are disfavoured and read strictly against whoever wrote them. The difference between the releases that worked and the one that did not had almost nothing to do with formatting and almost everything to do with whether the document said, in so many words, who was being released and from what.

This page walks through what the South Carolina cases actually decided, where the law is genuinely unsettled, what the state's electronic signature statute does and does not do for you, and how to adapt the downloadable form for a business operating here. It is general information and not legal advice; a South Carolina lawyer should read your finished form before a customer signs it.

How South Carolina treats liability waivers

The starting point is a 1964 telephone directory case. In Pride v. Southern Bell Telephone and Telegraph the Supreme Court upheld a clause limiting the phone company's liability for botching a dentist's yellow pages advertisement, and in doing so set out the sentence every later South Carolina release decision quotes: because such provisions tend to induce a want of care, they are not favoured by the law and will be strictly construed against the party relying on them. Pride also listed the situations where public policy overrides freedom of contract, including a duty of public service, a matter in which the public has an interest, and parties who are not on roughly equal bargaining terms.

Seventeen years later the Court applied that framework to recreation. Roy Huckaby signed a waiver and release on entering Confederate Motor Speedway, crashed into a guardrail he said had been badly installed, and lost. The Court held he had voluntarily entered the agreement and that his claim was barred, adding assumption of risk as a second, independent ground, and observing that other states had rejected public policy attacks on racetrack releases. The Court of Appeals reached the same result in 2005 in McCune v. Myrtle Beach Indoor Shooting Range, where a paintball player blinded in one eye by a pellet that got past a loose rental mask was held to a release that explicitly and unambiguously covered the operator's own negligence.

Then there is Fisher ex rel. Estate of Fisher v. Stevens, decided by the Court of Appeals in 2003, which is the case a South Carolina operator should read first. It is the one where the release lost. The most recent word from the Supreme Court came in Maybank v. BB&T Corp. in 2016, a wealth management dispute rather than a recreation case, but its summary is the current law: clauses of this type are generally upheld as commercially reasonable, yet they are disfavoured, strictly construed against the drafter, subject to being declared unenforceable for public policy or unconscionability, and powerless against a party's own actual fraud. The Court added that public policy in this state is determined by looking to legislative enactments wherever possible, which is a useful signal about how a judge will approach an argument that your form offends it.

Waivers signed for minors in South Carolina

South Carolina has not answered the question. No decision of the Supreme Court or the Court of Appeals holds that a parent may give up a child's own prospective claim against an operator, and none holds that a parent may not. There is no statute on it. Anyone who tells you the point is settled here is usually thinking of McCune, which is sometimes described in secondary material as a case about a minor. Read the opinion and it is plainly not: Christine McCune was an adult, she was playing paintball with her husband and friends, and no guardian signature was anywhere in the case.

What South Carolina does settle makes a guardian's release look fragile. A contract made by a minor is voidable at the minor's election, valid only until the minor or the minor's representative disaffirms it, and the minor cannot keep the favourable parts and drop the rest. Section 15-3-40 stops the limitation clock while an injured person is within the age of eighteen years. And section 62-5-433 requires that any settlement of a claim over twenty-five thousand dollars in favour of a minor be put to a court on a verified petition, with the petitioner swearing that the deal is in the child's best interests, which tells you how much independent weight the state gives a parent's judgment once real money is involved.

That does not make the guardian block pointless, and you should keep it. It records informed consent to the child taking part, authorises emergency medical treatment, releases whatever claims the parent holds in a personal capacity, and preserves proof that the family was told what the activity involves. Those are worth having. Simply do not build your risk planning on the assumption that a fifteen year old's negligence claim went away when a parent tapped a signature pad.

What the waiver must say to hold up in South Carolina

There is no conspicuousness statute here, no type-size rule, and no case striking a release for small print. The requirement is explicitness. South Carolina follows the rule that an exculpatory clause will never be construed to exempt a party from liability for his own negligence in the absence of explicit language clearly indicating that such was the intent of the parties, and Fisher applied it with some force.

Three drafting lessons come straight out of Fisher. First, name the parties. Daniel Fisher's release covered promoters, the racing association, the track operator and owner, officials, vehicle owners, drivers and pit crews, but the court held that in a NASCAR sanctioned setting vehicle owner and driver are terms of art meaning competitors, so the owner and driver of the wrecker he fell from were not released at all. If you want your landlord, your equipment supplier, your volunteers or your independent instructors covered, identify them by category in the document rather than hoping a generic word stretches far enough.

Second, resist the sweeping catch-all. The same release also purported to cover any persons in any restricted area, and the court held that clause too broad to enforce and void as against public policy, pointing out that read literally it would protect someone who had sneaked into the pits. In South Carolina breadth is not strength. The broader the clause, the more room a judge has to say it never clearly informed the signer what he was giving up.

Third, look at the documents that survived. The paintball release in McCune runs to a handful of numbered paragraphs. It opens by describing the real risk of the activity, including permanent disability and death. It then states in capitals that the participant knowingly and freely assumes all such risks, both known and unknown, even if arising from the negligence of those released. It lists the released parties, carves out gross negligence and wanton misconduct, and closes with a capitalised line confirming the signer has read it, understands its terms and knows he has given up substantial rights. That is the shape to copy: specific, explicit, short enough to read, and honest about what it does not cover.

Gross negligence and what a South Carolina waiver cannot cover

Assume your release stops at ordinary negligence. No reported South Carolina decision has enforced one against a gross negligence claim, and in McCune the Court of Appeals made a point of saying that the release before it did not preclude a gross negligence action, that its opinion should not be read as creating an indefensible position for all injuries sustained during inherently dangerous recreational activities, and it cited decisions from Tennessee and West Virginia holding that agreements against liability for gross negligence are unenforceable. That is not a holding, and the honest description is that the question remains open, but it is as clear a signal as an intermediate appellate court can give without deciding.

Two related points are settled enough to plan around. Pride recorded that the plaintiff had alleged wilful as well as negligent conduct and that the Court was expressing no opinion on whether the contractual limitation could relieve the defendant of a wilful act, leaving that door shut rather than open. Maybank held that a party cannot use an exculpatory clause to keep the benefit of an agreement procured by its own actual fraud, although a jury finding of constructive fraud was not enough to defeat the clause there.

It helps to know what the threshold looks like. South Carolina defines gross negligence as the failure to exercise even the slightest care, or the intentional conscious failure to do something it is incumbent on you to do. That is a high bar for a plaintiff, and in McCune the plaintiff conceded at oral argument that the range had shown at least slight care by trying to adjust her mask. Your protection against the claim that clears that bar is not the paperwork. It is staff training, maintained equipment, written inspection records and adequate insurance, plus a release that says openly it does not extend to gross negligence, recklessness, wilful or wanton conduct or intentional acts, together with a severability clause so one struck sentence does not take the document with it.

Electronic signatures in South Carolina

South Carolina enacted the Uniform Electronic Transactions Act in 2004, as chapter 6 of title 26. Section 26-6-70 does the main work: a record or signature must not be denied legal effect or enforceability solely because it is in electronic form, an electronic record satisfies a law requiring a record to be in writing, and an electronic signature satisfies a law requiring a signature. Section 26-6-130 adds that evidence cannot be excluded in a proceeding merely because the record or signature is electronic.

The section that decides real cases is 26-6-50. The chapter applies only to transactions between parties who agree to conduct transactions by electronic means, and whether they agreed is determined from the context and surrounding circumstances, including their conduct. A participant who taps through a kiosk at your front desk has probably agreed, but a discrete step in which the signer confirms they are willing to sign electronically turns a probability into a record. Note too that a party who agrees to one electronic transaction may refuse others, and that right cannot be waived by agreement.

Attribution comes from section 26-6-90: an electronic record or signature is attributable to a person if it is the act of that person, shown in any manner, including evidence of the efficacy of a security procedure. In practice that means an email or phone verification, an identifiable device and address, and a timestamp that ties the signature to a particular person at a particular moment. Section 26-6-120 covers retention, and it asks for a stored record that accurately reflects the information as first generated and remains accessible for later reference, which is a reason to keep the exact document version alongside the signature rather than a regenerated summary of it.

How to use this form in South Carolina

Open the Word template and work through every square-bracket placeholder: the legal name of the business, the trading name your customers know, the address, the activity, and South Carolina plus your county in the governing-law clause. Then do the South Carolina specific pass. Expand the list of released parties so it names the entity, its owners, officers, employees, instructors, contractors, volunteers, landlord and equipment suppliers by category, because Fisher shows that a term you assume is generic may be read as a term of art. Keep the explicit statement that the participant is releasing claims caused by the negligence of those parties. Delete any residual catch-all that would sweep in strangers. Write the risk description to match what your activity actually involves, in the concrete way the paintball release described a pellet injury. Retain the sentence excluding gross negligence, recklessness, wilful or wanton conduct and intentional acts, and retain the severability clause. Keep the guardian block for consent and medical authority while planning on the child's claim surviving. If you employ the people doing the activity, take them out of this document entirely and handle worker injuries through workers' compensation and your employment paperwork. Add the equine warning if you run horses, check your permit, inspection and insurance position if you run rides, and keep a gym membership contract separate from the waiver so the Physical Fitness Services Act rules apply to the contract alone. Strike the note to the business, then have a South Carolina attorney review what is left.

To move it online, rebuild each section as its own text block in a Waiver.com template, keep the released-parties list and the negligence sentence in a block of their own with an acknowledgment field beside them, add participant and guardian fields, put the agreement to sign electronically on its own step, and publish a version. Every signature then carries the version it was given against, the timestamp and the identity data that section 26-6-90 asks for, which is exactly the record you want when a strictly construing court asks what this participant was told.