Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. v. Wright
Indiana Supreme Court
774 N.E.2d 891 (2002)
After Wright (plaintiff) slipped on water at a Wal-Mart (defendant) store, an internal Store Manual detailing spill-response procedures was admitted at trial, and Wright's jury instruction told jurors the manual's policies constituted evidence of what Wal-Mart itself deemed ordinary care; Wal-Mart objected, arguing the jury should independently determine ordinary care rather than defer to the company's own internal standards. A jury found for Wright, and the intermediate appellate court affirmed the instruction as proper.
Whether, in a negligence action, the appropriate standard applied to a defendant's conduct is whether the defendant objectively exhibited the ordinary care a reasonably prudent person would have exercised under like circumstances, rather than a subjective standard held by the defendant itself.