What is meant by duty of care and the legal implication if it is not followed?

Answer 1

The concept of duty of care is fundamental to the tort of negligence. It means that when you are doing certain things you have a legal duty to prevent damage to persons who might be affected by your actions. At first the duty only arose where it was fairly obvious that damage might result and where the actions needed to avoid the damage were relatively simple. The case which started the whole idea of lawsuits for negligence (less than 80 years ago!) involved a soft drink bottler being held liable for having no system to see if there was anything living in the empty bottles before they were filled.

However, since then courts have made the duty of care virtually limitless. Anyone whose action or lack of action is even remotely connected with someone else's damage is at risk of being found to have a duty of care. There is no way that even the most insanely paranoid person could foresee every possible circumstance in which a duty of care might be imposed.

If it is found that you had a duty of care and did not do whatever it is that, in hindsight, someone thinks you should have done, you can be successfully sued. In some jurisdictions, especially those where juries decide the amount of damages to be awarded, damage awards even in trivial cases can be so ludicrously high that only the very very rich could ever hope to pay them. In other words, these damage awards will bankrupt you, unless paying legal bills does it for you first.

An entire industry has been created around creating insurance policies which will pay your damage awards and legal costs in the event that this kind of disaster should befall you. Insanely paranoid people hired by the insurance company will dictate to you what steps you should take to minimize the risk (and thus maximize the insurance company's profit). This insurance is necessary because judges have basically overruled the intention of the judges who created the concept of negligence in the first place, which was that people should take care where there is an obvious risk to the health or safety of others, by removing the requirement that the risk should be obvious.

Answer 2

You have a responsibility to take care to not injure people around you.