Your employer can still be liable for a manager’s conduct at an informal after-party.

The situation

A recruitment company held an organised Christmas party for around two dozen staff and partners, with taxis paid for by the employer. When the official event ended, about half the group carried on drinking together at a nearby hotel.

In the early hours, talk turned to a business decision the managing director had made. When staff at the table questioned it, he stood up, reasserted his authority over the decision, and punched a colleague twice, leaving him with a severe and permanent brain injury.

What the court found

The High Court initially held that this was a purely voluntary, personal social occasion, separate from the organised work event, with too weak a connection to the managing director's role to make the employer responsible. The Court of Appeal disagreed and overturned that finding.

It held that the managing director was still exercising his managerial authority when the assault happened. Standing up and reasserting control over the business decision was itself an exercise of that authority, and the assault that followed was directly connected to it. The late hour, the change of venue, and the informal, unplanned nature of the gathering did not break that connection.

If you're hurt by a colleague or manager's conduct at a work social event, your employer's responsibility does not automatically end when the official event closes its doors. What decides the question is whether the person responsible was still, in substance, acting as your manager at the time. Someone in a position of authority who carries on directing, deciding or lecturing staff after the formal party ends can still be treated as exercising that authority, even in a taxi, a hotel bar, or someone's front room at 2am.

This is not a rule that turns every office party mishap into a claim. A personal falling-out between colleagues, with nothing to do with anyone's job, remains personal, and does not make an employer responsible. The distinction the courts draw is whether managerial authority was genuinely being exercised at the time. Simply working together does not put an incident in that category.

If you have been hurt by a manager or colleague's conduct at or after a work event, and that person was still acting in a managerial capacity when it happened, get advice. This is a fact-sensitive area of law, and how the incident unfolded matters as much as the injury itself.

The same principle, that your employer answers for what a manager does while still acting as a manager, comes up again in a case about a manager humiliating an employee at work.