Maryland Ditches Limitations on Child Abuse Claims

Maryland has joined the trend toward getting rid of statutes of limitations in child abuse cases. Even if your youth organization is not in a state with an unlimited time for filing suit, your legislators could follow the trend any time. For that reason, we recommend that all youth organizations take the following steps:

1. Locate all of the insurance policies that you can for the entire time that your organization has been in existence. Look through all of your old files to get whatever information you can. Financial records can be a big help, as they often will show payment of insurance premiums. Ask your insurance agent or broker to search their files. Gather whatever information you can, keep it in a central location, and hope that you never need it.
2. Take a new look at your document retention policy. Most such policies are built around the statute of limitations for personal injury or employment claims. If there no longer is a statute of limitations, you may need to keep more records longer. Digitize as many records as you can, both to save space and increase your ability to locate them. Some records that you should look at keeping longer include client files, employee files, incident reports, parent and camper handbooks, employee handbooks, schedules, and relevant contracts.
3. Plan your crisis response. Do tabletop exercises now so that your staff will be prepared when a significant claim comes in. For a checklist of how to plan your response, email us, and we’ll send it to you.