A medical property has the lowest tolerance for ice in this market and the least forgiving population walking across it. The plow is the easy part of the contract.
Work is carried out by an independent snow removal operator under their own company name and insurance. This site arranges the introduction and clears nothing itself.
Commercial triggers in this market run one to two inches against the two-inch residential standard, and an established Oakland County commercial operator sets them per property. On a medical site the number is usually at the bottom of that range, and the more important provision is the one that does not mention depth.
The weather that hurts a clinic is not fourteen inches overnight — that closes the building. It is a quarter inch of refreeze across the accessible aisle at 7 a.m. after a thaw, or freezing rain that triggers no plow contract written anywhere. Both need a de-icing provision that stands on its own, not one conditioned on plowable accumulation.
Scope a medical property as a continuous route rather than as a set of surfaces, because that is how it is walked and how it is examined afterwards:
Where snow is stacked matters more here than anywhere else on the list. A pile placed uphill of an entrance drains across it, refreezes overnight and produces exactly the surface the whole contract exists to prevent. Name the stacking locations in the contract by position.
Michigan’s premises liability framework changed on July 28, 2023, when the Supreme Court decided Kandil-Elsayed v. F & E Oil, Inc. and Pinsky v. Kroger Co. of Michigan and overruled Lugo v. Ameritech Corp. (2001). Open and obvious is no longer a no-duty rule. It is folded into breach and comparative fault, so the question in a fall case is now what the property did — whether it plowed, whether it salted, whether it warned — and Michigan’s comparative fault rule allows recovery even where the person who fell was partly at fault.
For a medical or office property that makes three things contract terms rather than good practice:
That last one is the part most contracts omit and the part a claim asks about. The strongest commercial operator in this county advertises documented service records for liability files as a product feature, which is a fair reading of where the market has landed. The cases.
Michigan licenses no snow removal contractor, so the certificate of insurance is the entire verification — and Michigan insurance agencies warn about a specific gap: many commercial auto carriers exclude plowing operations, and personal policies exclude business use outright. A certificate showing commercial auto is not the same as coverage for a blade on your pavement.
Ask for: general liability, commercial auto naming plowing operations, and workers’ compensation. As a public benchmark, the State of Michigan requires of its own snow contractors $500,000 each occurrence and $1,000,000 aggregate general liability, workers’ compensation with a waiver of subrogation, employers liability at $100,000 per accident, and insurers rated A.M. Best “A-” or better. A local operator serving estate and gated-community grounds in this county advertises $2 million in general liability with certificates on request.
Describe the property, the trigger depth you need and where snow can be stored. That is enough for proposals that can actually be set side by side.
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