[RyanCahoon]

Tl;dr for teams who have thought about this and made provisions, what do you have in place to protect your team and its members/associates in the event of an accident (particularly in the shop)?

We've had a couple parents/mentors join the team in the last year who are raising a concern over how formally protected the team and individual people would be if we had an accident in the shop. Some background:
- We meet at a school which has liability insurance, but don't have a faculty member present at most of our meetings so our coverage is somewhat uncertain (we're asking into this).
- A good portion of our tools are not owned by the school
- We've recently formed a separate 501(c)(3) for the team.

Some questions:
- For those teams that have an insurance policy under their own (non-profit) company, did you have to do anything special to get protection for your mentors (such as somehow making them employees)?
- One of our mentors has some industry experience in machine shops and says that the usual practice there is to hire an external service to do all the training, so that service would be liable for any observed deficiency/negligence in training. Is this a concern for FIRST teams?
- Generally, what policies do you have around student and mentor tool use?
- Do you have any other team policies to protect your interests?

We're meeting with our own legal counsel and will be meeting with our school's insurance representative, but I was asked to get some idea of what other teams do, to give us some context.

Liability Insurance has been discussed at length on these forums, but what we keep hearing is that if somebody gets badly injured, everybody associated is going to get sued anyway. This is what we're trying to avoid/mitigate.

Thanks,