Negligent Security Lawyer in Colorado
Assaulted, shot, or attacked on someone else's property? When an apartment complex, bar, hotel, or parking lot ignored the warning signs, Colorado law makes them answer for it.
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What Can You Recover in a Colorado Negligent Security Case?
Negligent security cases at our firm typically settle for $500,000 to $10 million, and the catastrophic ones define the top of that range. The attacker rarely has assets; the property owner's insurance is where accountability lives.
Bigger and faster settlements come from trial preparation that starts the day you sign.
With us, you speak directly with your attorney, we help you get immediate medical care, regardless whether you have insurance, and there's no fee unless we win. Contact us now for a free consultation.
Where Did It Happen?
Negligent security cases turn on the property and the city they happened in, and we've built a dedicated playbook for each. Start with the page that matches your case: Denver negligent security, Aurora negligent security, apartment complex assaults, bar and nightclub assaults, parking lot assaults, hotel injuries in Denver and Aurora, and sexual assault claims in Denver and Aurora. Everything below is the statewide law those cases share.
What Is Negligent Security Under Colorado Law?
Negligent security is premises liability. Under Colorado's Premises Liability Act (C.R.S. § 13-21-115), a property owner owes the people lawfully on the property a duty to protect them against dangers it knew about or should have known about. When the danger is a foreseeable crime and the owner failed to take reasonable security measures, working locks, adequate lighting, functioning cameras, trained guards, the owner answers for the harm that followed. The duty is highest for invitees: tenants, hotel guests, and paying patrons, which is who most victims are. This is the same statute from Grand Junction to Greeley; what changes by city is the evidence, which is why the city pages above exist.
Foreseeability Is the Whole Fight
The owner's defense in every one of these cases is "we could not have seen it coming." The answer lives in records that exist for every property in Colorado: prior police calls to the address, earlier assaults and break-ins, tenant complaints about broken gates and burned-out lights, and the owner's own security assessments. We pull the calls-for-service history from the local police department, whatever the jurisdiction, and match it against what the owner actually spent on security. A property with a documented crime history and a dark parking lot is not unlucky. It is negligent.
The Evidence Disappears in Days
Surveillance systems across Colorado overwrite themselves on short cycles, sometimes within a week. The first thing we do in any negligent security case, anywhere in the state, is send a preservation demand for the video, the key-card logs, the guard schedules, and the incident reports, before they are gone. If you were hurt yesterday, this is the reason to call today.
The Empty-Chair Trap
Colorado is a several-liability state, and it gives property owners their favorite move: designating the criminal as a "non-party at fault" under C.R.S. § 13-21-111.5 and asking the jury to pin the blame on an attacker who has no money and often was never caught. Because each defendant generally pays only its own share of fault, that empty chair can gut a recovery. Beating it takes the foreseeability record: the more the owner knew, the larger the share of fault that lands where the insurance is. Colorado's modified comparative negligence rule (C.R.S. § 13-21-111, the 50% bar) is the second half of the same playbook, so expect to be told you provoked it or should not have been there. We answer both with the owner's own paper trail.
Public Property Changes the Deadlines
If the assault happened on government property, public housing, a transit station, a public campus, the Colorado Governmental Immunity Act applies and a written notice of claim is due within 182 days under C.R.S. § 24-10-109. Miss it and the claim is barred, no matter how strong. Private-property claims generally carry a two-year statute of limitations under C.R.S. § 13-80-102. Both clocks are shorter than they sound, because the evidence clock (the surveillance video) is measured in days.
A Statewide Practice, Built for Trial
Lionheart is a Denver-based trial firm and we take negligent security cases across Colorado. These cases get filed in the district court of the county where the attack happened, and the county matters: jury pools, judges, and case timelines differ, and we build the file for the courtroom it will actually land in. Wherever the property is, the consultation is free, we answer within two hours, and you pay nothing unless we win.
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