Comment by atoav

I was asked to work for my employer as an responsible electrical engineer — a specific legal role that needs to be filled if your bosses don't want the liability buck to stop with them.

They fell in the same trap as you did now. You can try to make the libility tree complicated, but in the end the buck will stop with the person in charge unless they put things in place they have to legally put in place. Liability is like water, you can shift it around, but it always has to go somewhere. And if you don't know where it is as a boss, it is likely eating away at your foundation.

In my case they hoped I could just be the responsible electrical engineer on paper and a solve them of their liability. Then I explained them that I could do that, but that legally they would still liable until they provide that role with the time/resources/personal needed to do the job. In my case that would have meant dropping everything I did in my existing roles and reallocating 80% of my work time to that role.

In the end they decided to use an external company that covers that role for real. To them it was just a checkbox in the beginning, but only because they had no expertise in the legal dimension of the whole thing. And sure they could potentially have gone for years without problems, but one wrong electrical fire and they are in jail.

Under GDPR the potential liability we are talking about is 10 Million Euros or 2% of global annual turnover, whichever is higher. But yeah, go ahead, check your boxes.