*This article is general information for property managers, not legal advice. For claims or specific situations, talk to your attorney and insurance carrier.*
Most premises liability exposure in a parking lot doesn't come from dramatic failures. It comes from the small stuff a busy property manager stops seeing: a half-inch lip where two slabs of asphalt meet, a pothole that's "been there forever," a wheel stop sitting in a walking path. Then someone falls, and the question becomes what you knew, when you knew it, and what you did about it.
The legal backdrop in Georgia
Georgia's premises liability statute (O.C.G.A. § 51-3-1) requires an owner or occupier of land to exercise ordinary care to keep the premises and approaches safe for invitees — which includes customers, tenants, and their guests in your parking lot. In practice, claims tend to turn on two things:
- Notice: did the property know, or should it have known, about the hazard? A defect that's been visible for months is hard to call a surprise.
- Response: once known, was the hazard repaired, marked, or barricaded within a reasonable time?
This is why inspection and documentation aren't bureaucratic overhead — they are the defense. A property that can show routine inspections and prompt work orders is in a fundamentally different position than one that can't.
What actually counts as a trip hazard
There's no single statutory definition, but the federal accessibility standards give the most commonly referenced benchmark: under the 2010 ADA Standards, vertical level changes over 1/4 inch on an accessible route need treatment — changes between 1/4 and 1/2 inch must be beveled, and anything over 1/2 inch requires a ramped transition. Plaintiffs' experts know these numbers; your inspection checklist should too.
Walk your lot for:
- Raised or offset cracks — especially where asphalt meets concrete sidewalks, curbs, or dumpster pads
- Potholes and unraveling patches — even shallow ones catch heels and toes
- Deteriorated speed bumps with crumbling edges or missing paint
- Wheel stops — broken, shifted into walkways, or unpainted (a notorious nighttime tripper)
- Birdbaths (ponding areas) that become slick spots, algae patches, or ice in winter cold snaps
- Faded striping and crosswalks that no longer guide pedestrians away from drive lanes
- Abrupt transitions at drive entrances, ramps, and accessible routes
An inspection and documentation routine that holds up
You don't need software to do this well — you need consistency:
- Walk the lot monthly (and after major storms) with a standard checklist. Photograph anything questionable with a date stamp and a scale reference — a tape measure next to a raised edge tells the whole story.
- Log it. Date found, location, severity, photo.
- Triage. Anything a pedestrian can catch a foot on gets marked (cone, paint) the same day it's found, and scheduled for repair.
- Close the loop. Photograph the completed repair and file it with the original report. The before-and-after pair is the record you want to have.
- Keep annual condition photos of the whole lot. They establish baseline and show a pattern of attention.
The repair hierarchy: matching fix to defect
Not every hazard needs the same response, and over-repairing wastes budget you'll want later. The typical hierarchy:
- Crack filling and sealing — for cracks before they become raised edges or potholes. This is the cheapest intervention in asphalt maintenance and the one that prevents the most future hazards.
- Pothole repair and patching — full-depth patches for potholes and localized failures. Cold-patch is a stopgap; a proper hot-mix repair is the durable fix.
- Grinding or beveling — for isolated raised edges where a full repair isn't yet justified.
- Mill and overlay — when hazards are widespread, the surface itself has failed and spot repairs become whack-a-mole. Milling restores proper transitions at curbs and drains instead of building the lot higher.
- Fresh striping and markings — crosswalks, stop bars, wheel stop paint, and accessible-space markings are safety devices, not decoration. Restriping is also the moment to correct accessible-space counts and layout.
A structured maintenance program rolls all of this into scheduled inspections and budgeted work — which is exactly the paper trail described above, produced automatically.
When to bring in a contractor
If your lot has more than a handful of hazards, get a professional condition walk instead of piecemeal work orders. Biran Paving Group — Dunwoody-based, serving Metro Atlanta, 15+ years and 500+ projects, licensed and insured with a COI available on request — will walk the property, document conditions, and give you a prioritized repair plan you can take to ownership: what's urgent, what can wait a season, and what belongs in next year's budget.
Call Ben Biran at (678) 332-8941 or email biranpaving@gmail.com.