Meaning & use
sequential liability
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Meaning
noununcountablelegal
A way of dividing legal or financial responsibility in which one party must pay or answer first, and the next party is only pursued once the earlier one cannot cover the loss.
Grammar: Usually used without an article: sequential liability applies here.
Patterns
- sequential liability of someone
- sequential liability for something
Under sequential liability, the builder is pursued first and the architect only answers if the builder cannot pay.
The contract set up sequential liability, so the bank could not claim from the guarantor until the borrower had defaulted.
Lawyers argued that the policy created sequential liability rather than shared responsibility.
Common combinations
- establish sequential liability
- The court had to establish sequential liability among the three contractors.
- rule of sequential liability
- The rule of sequential liability protects the later parties until earlier ones are exhausted.
- sequential liability clause
- A sequential liability clause was added to the loan agreement.
- apply sequential liability
- Some insurers apply sequential liability when several policies cover the same loss.
Synonyms and how they differ
- successive liability
- This is nearly the same idea but is the more usual phrase when responsibility passes from one owner or period to the next.
- secondary liability
- This describes a party that answers only after another has failed, while sequential liability describes the whole ordered chain.
- tiered liability
- This stresses that responsibility is split into levels, not necessarily that each level must be exhausted in turn.
Opposites
Word family
- sequence noun
- an ordered series of things
- sequential adjective
- following one after another in order
- sequentially adverb
- in order, one after the other
- liable adjective
- legally responsible
Commonly confused: sequential liability or joint liability?
sequential liability vs joint liability
With joint liability, every party can be pursued for the whole debt at once. With sequential liability, they are pursued in a fixed order.
Practice
Which situation best shows sequential liability?
Choose one answer.
Sequential liability means responsibility follows an order. The first option describes joint liability, where all can be pursued at once.
Make it your own
Write a sentence using “sequential liability”, then check it and compare it with the examples above.