Michigan premises law changed materially in 2023, and most contractor websites in this market have not caught up. For an association board or a commercial owner it is the most consequential thing on this site.
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.
Lugo v. Ameritech Corp. (2001) made the open and obvious doctrine a no-duty rule in Michigan. If a hazard was open and obvious, the landowner owed no duty of care at all, and the analysis stopped there.
Ice is the textbook open and obvious hazard. The practical result was that Michigan snow and ice cases were close to unwinnable for plaintiffs for twenty years, and a great deal of the market’s habits — including how little documentation anyone kept — were built on that.
On July 28, 2023 the Michigan Supreme Court decided Kandil-Elsayed v. F & E Oil, Inc. and Pinsky v. Kroger Co. of Michigan together, and overruled Lugo.
Open and obvious is no longer a question of duty. It is folded into breach and comparative fault. The analysis now runs through whether a duty was owed, whether it was breached, whether the condition was open, obvious and avoidable, whether the owner took reasonable steps to address it, and how fault divides between the parties. Because Michigan is a comparative fault state, a plaintiff can recover even when partly at fault themselves.
The clearest illustration is the one the commentary on the decision uses directly: a woman who slips on ice at a gas station would have lost in 2001, and can now recover — with the court weighing the gas station’s actions to plow, to salt, and to make its patrons aware of the ice.
Those three verbs are the whole practical consequence. They are all things that either happened and were recorded, or cannot be proven at all.
A separate line of Michigan cases runs to the contractor’s duty to third parties rather than the owner’s.
Fultz v. Union-Commerce Associates, 470 Mich. 460 (2004), is literally a snow plowing contract case. It held that a contractor owed a third party a tort duty only where it created a hazard “separate and distinct” from its contractual obligations — a notoriously difficult standard that largely insulated snow contractors from third-party claims.
Loweke v. Ann Arbor Ceiling & Partition Co. (2011) substantially reformed that. The Court held that a contractual relationship does not eliminate ordinary tort duties, returning to more traditional tort law: if one having assumed to act does so negligently, liability to third parties follows. Contractors owe a duty of care in performing the work itself, independent of the contract.
One thing this page does not do: assert a relationship between the two lines. Whether and how Fultz survives Kandil-Elsayed was not verified, so Fultz and Loweke are cited here for the contractor-duty question and Kandil-Elsayed for the premises question, with no claim about how they interact.
Taken together: Loweke (2011) expanded contractors’ exposure to third parties, and Kandil-Elsayed (2023) removed the owner’s defense that visible ice was the plaintiff’s own problem. A Michigan snow removal contractor in 2026 is materially more exposed than one in 2010, and so is the property that hired them.
Liability also flows between them. Property owners are responsible for the work of contractors they hire, and the allocation is a contract term rather than a default. What defends both parties is the same thing:
It is not an accident that the strongest commercial snow operator in this county advertises documented service records for liability files as a selling point. That is the market reading the 2023 decision correctly.
Michigan issues no license for snow removal, so there is no credential to check. The nearest thing to a public standard is what the State of Michigan requires of contractors it hires itself:
An operator serving gated communities and estate grounds in this county advertises $2 million in general liability with certificates on request. Asking a contractor to meet or exceed the state’s own schedule is a defensible request with a public source behind it.
Nothing on this page is legal advice, and this site is not a law firm. It is a summary of published decisions and published insurance requirements, offered so that a board or an owner knows which questions to take to their own attorney and their own broker.
Describe the property and the exposure. Insurance certificates and service-record practice are fair questions to ask before the season, and they are the ones this market answers unevenly.
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