Jacob Pries, Appellant,

This opinion is nonprecedential except as provided by
Minn. R. Civ. App. P. 136.01, subd. 1(c).

STATE OF MINNESOTA
IN COURT OF APPEALS
A24-2004

Jacob Pries,
Appellant,

vs.

Whitewater Dairy, LLC, et al.,
Respondents,

vs.

Bruce Kreofsky & Sons, Inc., a/k/a Great River Overhead Door,
a/k/a Kreofsky Building Supplies, a/k/a Kreofsky Overhead Door,
a/k/a KBS Companies,
Respondent.

Filed September 2, 2025
Reversed and remanded
Ross, Judge

Winona County District Court
File No. 85-CV-22-937

Taylor Brandt Cunningham, Bolt Law Firm, Anoka, Minnesota; and

Richard J. Schroeder, Schroeder & Mandel, P.A., St. Paul, Minnesota; and

Lance J. Redlinger, Redlinger Law Firm, Shoreview, Minnesota (for appellant)

Elisa M. Hatlevig, Tessa M. McEllistrem, Jardine, Logan & O’Brien, PLLP, Lake Elmo,
Minnesota (for respondents Whitewater Dairy, LLC, et al.)

Jonathon M. Zentner, Aaron C. Abelleira, Jeffrey M. Markowitz, Arthur, Chapman,
Kettering, Smetak & Pikala, P.A., Minneapolis, Minnesota (for respondent Bruce Kreofsky
& Sons, Inc.)

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Considered and decided by Wheelock, Presiding Judge; Ross, Judge; and Connolly,
Judge.
NONPRECEDENTIAL OPINION
ROSS, Judge
A worker at Whitewater Dairy opened a tall overhead barn door while Jacob Pries
was repairing it, toppling Pries’s lift and sending him to the ground, where the falling lift
crushed his foot. Pries sued Whitewater for negligence. Whitewater successfully moved
for summary judgment on the ground that it owed no duty of care to Pries, an employee of
an independent contractor. Pries appeals, arguing principally that there are genuine factual
questions about whether Whitewater, as a landowner, owed him a duty of care. Because
we conclude that there are factual issues as to whether Whitewater should have anticipated
the harm to Pries despite the obvious nature of the danger, we reverse and remand.
FACTS
At this summary-judgment stage in this negligence lawsuit, we derive this factual
summary from the undisputed evidence and construe any disputed evidence in the light
most favorable to the appellant, against whom the district court entered judgment.
Whitewater Dairy’s approximately 15-foot-tall overhead barn doors were
functioning improperly in January 2018 because some of their structural screws broke. A
Whitewater manager summoned Great River Overhead Door for repairs. Great River is a
department within Kreofsky Building Supplies (KBS). KBS’s overhead-door department
manager believed that replacing the screws with bolts and locknuts would fix the problem,
and he assigned Great River employee Jacob Pries, the appellant in this case, to the task.
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Pries was a 22-year-old college student who worked part time for Great River. He
had worked in KBS’s construction business in 2014 and began working for Great River
around 2017. By the time his manager directed him to fix Whitewater’s doors, Pries had
some on-the-job experience with garage doors and operating a scissor lift, but his
Whitewater assignment on January 19 was his first time working on a construction project
alone. An overhead-door manager at KBS advised Pries on the day of the assignment how
to make the repairs. And he told Pries that “everyone [at Whitewater] was aware that [Pries]
was going there that day” and that “they know you’re coming.” Pries went to Whitewater
in his KBS truck, transporting the scissor lift.
A Whitewater manager had told a worker at the dairy that Pries would be arriving
to fix the doors that morning. Pries arrived at about 8:30. He found the worker already
using a boom lift inside the barn on a different project. According to Pries, he and the
worker briefly discussed only where each would work inside the barn to avoid interfering
with the other. According to the worker, however, he warned Pries that “we are going
through the barn feeding pretty much all day.” Pries did not place marker cones or caution
tape to warn dairy workers not to open the garage doors. Pries did not disengage the doors
to prevent them from opening, believing that Whitewater had taken precautions related to
his project.
Pries replaced the screws on three of six barn doors and then moved his scissor lift
to within two feet of the fourth door. He raised himself inside the lift’s basket to the top of
the 15-foot door. Meanwhile a dairy worker was feeding cows. That worker had been in
and out of the barn three times that morning perhaps before Pries arrived, seeing no one
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working on a scissor lift. He had been told about a week earlier that someone would be
there to fix the barn doors, “but they never said any time in specific.” Using a remote-
control device, the worker activated the barn door that Pries was working on. The door
began to open. It raised into Pries’s scissor lift, knocking the lift and Pries over, onto the
floor. Part of the lift landed on Pries’s foot, crushing it. Pries spent 30 days in the hospital,
had multiple surgeries, and lost part of his crushed foot by amputation.
Pries sued Whitewater for negligence. Whitewater filed a third-party complaint
against KBS. The district court granted summary judgment, dismissing Pries’s claim
against Whitewater, reasoning in relevant part that Whitewater owed no duty to warn Pries
of the open and obvious risk that a barn door might open.
Pries appeals.
DECISION
Pries challenges the district court’s summary-judgment decision favoring
Whitewater. We review the decision de novo. See STAR Ctrs., Inc. v. Faegre & Benson,
L.L.P., 644 N.W.2d 72, 76–77 (Minn. 2002). Summary judgment is appropriate if no
genuine issue of material fact exists and the moving party is entitled to judgment as a matter
of law. Minn. R. Civ. P. 56.01. We base the decision on the undisputed facts and on the
disputed facts construed in the light most favorable to the party against whom summary
judgment was granted. See J.E.B. v. Danks, 785 N.W.2d 741, 746 (Minn. 2010). Our
review under this standard leads us to reverse.
The district court based its decision in part on its conclusion that the undisputed
facts establish that Whitewater owed Pries no duty of care on a theory of landowner
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liability. The conclusion is mistaken. Although the supreme court has in only limited
circumstances held “a hiring company liable for injuries to an independent contractor’s
employees,” Sutherland v. Barton, 570 N.W.2d 1, 5 (Minn. 1997), the hiring company, as
a landowner, has a duty to use reasonable care toward an entrant and may be directly liable
for breaching that duty , see Conover v. N. States Power Co., 313 N.W.2d 397, 401–02
(Minn. 1981). For the following reasons, we believe that Whitewater could be held liable
depending on how a fact-finder resolves triable issues of fact.
Pries contends that Whitewater is liable both because an unwarned dairy worker on
its premises caused the injury by opening the barn door and alternatively (or additionally)
because, having failed to prevent workers from opening the door, Whitewater failed to
warn Pries of the danger that one of the workers might open it. Pries’s theories of liability
based on Whitewater’s status as a landowner find support in the law. A landowner’s duty
of reasonable care to invitees may “require [the landowner] to warn the invitee, or to take
other reasonable steps to protect him, against [a] known or obvious condition or activity,
if the possessor has reason to expect that the invitee will nevertheless suffer physical harm.”
Peterson v. W. T. Rawleigh Co., 144 N.W.2d 555, 557–58 (Minn. 1966) (quotation
omitted); see also Senogles v. Carlson, 902 N.W.2d 38, 42 (Minn. 2017) (observing that a
landowner has no duty of care to invitees if the “danger is known or obvious to them, unless
the [landowner] should anticipate the harm despite such knowledge or obviousness”
(quotation omitted)). The underlying components of this basis for liability— whether a
danger is known, whether it is obvious, and whether the landowner could anticipate harm—
are generally questions of fact. See Olmanson v. LeSueur County, 693 N.W.2d 876, 881
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(Minn. 2005). And in this case, the relevant facts are at least somewhat disputed. Pries
blends his theories of landowner and direct -action liability, so we examine the bases
together in the premises-liability context.
We first identify the dangerous condition that resulted in Pries’s injury. The parties
and the district court implicitly recognized that the danger to Pries was the possibility that
a barn door he was working on would open into his lift while he was repairing the door.
We discuss the controlling issues accordingly.
Known or Obvious Danger
Pries argues unconvincingly that factual questions exist as to whether the danger
was known or obvious . Whether a danger was known is a subjective consideration that
depends on the entrant’s “actual appreciation of the danger.” Senogles, 902 N.W.2d at 44
(quotation omitted). But whether the danger was obvious is an objective consideration,
meaning that a danger is obvious “only if both the condition and the risk are apparent to
and would be recognized by a reasonable person in the position of the visitor.” Id.
(quotation omitted). The facts construed in Pries’s favor allow for the possibility that the
danger was not known to him. But they necessarily establish that the danger was
objectively obvious. Pries was working about 15 feet off the floor in a lift positioned in
front of an overhead door that he failed to disable or to flag with warning tape or cones.
Pries admitted in district court briefing that he knew “that a garage door could be opened
unexpectedly.” The district court properly concluded that the danger of the overhead door
opening and colliding with the scissor lift was obvious.
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Pries urges us to reject the district court’s conclusion on this issue, citing Louis v.
Louis, where the supreme court observed that in several prior cases “the danger associated
with the condition at issue was found to be clearly visible, or in plain view, meaning the
condition itself posed the obvious danger. ” 636 N.W.2d 314, 321–22 (Minn. 2001). Pries
reads too much into the Louis court’s statement, mistakenly suggesting that a danger itself
must be “visible, or in plain view” to the entrant to be obvious. The Louis court remanded
that case, which involved a landowner’s installation of a slide toward the shallow end of a
swimming pool, for the district court to “ determine if the activity or condition involved
known or obvious dangers.” Id. at 321 (emphasis added). In other words, it was not just the
plainly viewable object that could constitute an obvious danger; it was the potentially
foreseeable activity that an entrant might engage in involving the object, which, in that
case, was “the danger associated with doing a headfirst belly slide.” Id. So while it is true
that a dangerous condition that is itself “clearly visible, or in plain view” is a danger that
is obvious, id., it is also true that some dangers are instead obvious because of the injury
that a reasonable person would expect to result from a predictable course of activity
involving plainly viewable but not otherwise dangerous elements, like a remotely
controlled barn door and a closely placed scissor lift. And we hold that an objectively
reasonable person assigned to repair garage doors would anticipate the danger that could
result from an activated garage door during the repair process when other precautions have
not been taken. The district court correctly concluded that the danger to Pries was obvious.

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Whether Whitewater Should Have Anticipated the Harm
We must next decide whether a factual dispute exists as to whether Whitewater
should have anticipated the harm despite the obvious nature of the danger. While a
landowner is not ordinarily liable for a known or obvious danger, he will still be liable if
he “should anticipate the harm despite such knowledge or obviousness.” Senogles, 902
N.W.2d at 42 (quotation omitted). The supreme court has recently characterized this
anticipated-harm exception as presenting a question of foreseeability. Id. at 43. Whether a
risk was foreseeable depends on whether the danger was objectively reasonable to expect,
and “not simply whether it was within the realm of any conceivable possibilit y.” Id.
(quotation omitted). In cases where “the issue of foreseeability is clear, the court, as a
matter of law, should decide it, but in close cases, the issue of foreseeability is for the jury.”
Id. A wrinkle in this case leads us to believe the question is a close one that ought to go to
the jury rather than be resolved at summary judgment.
In many ways, the circumstances here resemble those the supreme court faced in
Sutherland, where it concluded that the landowner owed no duty of care to an experienced,
independently contracted electrician whom the landowner reasonably expected would take
necessary precautions to avoid self-electrocution. 570 N.W.2d at 7–8. The Sutherland court
concluded that, although the danger of electrocution was known and obvious, the
landowner who hired the independent contractor could not have anticipated the harm
because of the reasonably presumed expertise of the worker and his company. Id.
Whitewater likewise presumably hired Great River to fix its overhead barn door because
fixing overhead doors is what Great River does, and, under most circumstances,
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Whitewater would reasonably expect that any repairperson whom Great River sends to
perform the task would take the necessary precautions to avoid the obvious danger
associated with the opening of a barn door. But the Whitewater manager who knew that
Pries would be coming to work in the barn on the morning he was injured acknowledged
that, when someone is working in the barn, “you might want to have the farmhands know”
about it. The worker who opened the barn door agreed that he regularly entered and exited
the barn in the morning and, therefore, “We usually tell everybody noon, after noon is
safe.” Did Whitewater unreasonably fail to consider that Pries might not take added
precautions, relying instead on Whitewater’s expected warning to its employees? Should
Whitewater have expected that Pries would take precautions by disengaging the door when
Whitewater instead “usually” warns visitors to avoid the barn in the morning? Should
Whitewater have predicted that its employees might open the door while Pries was
working? These and related disputed issues of fact bear on whether Whitewater should
have anticipated that Pries might suffer physical harm despite the obviousness of the
danger.
Whitewater argues relatedly that it owed Pries no duty because his own conduct
caused his injury, citing Baber v. Dill, 531 N.W.2d 493 (Minn. 1995). In Baber, the worker
had helped build a retaining wall, leaving metal rods exposed and protruding after the first
day’s work. 531 N.W.2d at 494–95. The next day he stood on the “mud-caked,” “slippery,”
and partially constructed retaining wall, having not covered the exposed rods with any
protection, and then slipped, impaling himself on one of the rods. Id. at 495. The supreme
court held that the danger the rods created was so obvious that the landowner should not
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have anticipated any harm and concluded that “[i]n the present case . . . a landowner has
no duty to an invitee to warn or make safe known and obvious conditions when that invitee
has assisted in creating those conditions.” Id. at 495–96. It is true that Pries increased his
risk of injury by not disengaging the barn door and by not placing warning cones or tape.
But unlike the plaintiff in Baber, who helped physically construct the danger that injured
him, Pries did not. Although the placement of the scissor lift and Pries’s failure to
disengage the barn door contributed to the injury, the opening of the door by the dairy
worker also led to it. Pries has presented sufficient evidence to create a factual dispute,
under the specific circumstances of this case, as to whether Whitewater should have
anticipated that he could be harmed.
We acknowledge that Pries’s path to prevail at trial is very narrow on these facts.
But the supreme court has emphasized in several recent decisions that close calls on the
issue of foreseeability should be decided by a jury. See Senogles, 902 N.W.2d at 43, 47 –
48; Warren v. Dinter, 926 N.W.2d 370, 378 (Minn. 2019); Fenrich v. The Blake Sch., 920
N.W.2d 195, 205–07 (Minn. 2018); Montemayor v. Sebright Prods., Inc., 898 N.W.2d 623,
625, 629–31 (Minn. 2017). On the record here we cannot say that it was unforeseeable to
Whitewater that Pries could be harmed despite the obvious nature of the da nger. We
therefore reverse the summary-judgment decision favoring Whitewater.
Hazardous-Work Rule
We are not persuaded otherwise by Whitewater ’s suggestion that it is not liable to
Pries because he was specialized to do the hazardous work that caused his injuries. The
supreme court has stated that “one who hires an independent contractor with employees
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specialized to do the hazardous work should not be penalized by being held vicariously
liable for an injury to those employees .” Conover, 313 N.W.2d at 405 (emphasis added);
see also Sutherland, 570 N.W.2d at 5. We call this concept the hazardous-work rule. The
district court here relied in part on the hazardous-work rule, as we characterized it in
Presbrey v. James, 781 N.W.2d 13, 18–19 (Minn. App. 2010), to conclude that Whitewater
did not owe Pries a duty of care under a premises-liability theory. But Whitewater’s
vicarious liability is not at issue here. Pries builds his case on a premises-liability theory,
and the supreme court and this court have consistently held that premises liability concerns
a landowner’s direct liability. See Conover, 313 N.W.2d at 401; Sutherland, 570 N.W.2d
at 7; Zimmer v. Carlton Cnty. Co-op Power Ass’n, 483 N.W.2d 511, 513–14 (Minn. App.
1992), rev. denied (Minn. June 10, 1992). The supreme court’s rationale in Conover, and
the similar structure of its analysis in Sutherland, see 570 N.W.2d at 5–7, mean that the
hazardous-work rule does not apply to this case.
We recognize that we invoked the hazardous -work rule in our premises-liability
analysis in Presbrey, observing there that although Sutherland and Conover discuss the
rule in the retained-control context, “ we believe [the rule] applies with equal force to
premises liability on the facts of the instant case.” 781 N.W.2d at 19 (emphasis added).
The facts in Presbrey are not like the facts here. In Presbrey, the landowners hired an
experienced 70-year-old independent contractor to repair two “old and possibly structurally
unsound” decks. Id. at 15. The contractor fell to his death while working alone on the decks
on a “misty and drizzling” day. Id. at 16. Here, by contrast, Pries fell after an unwarned
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person working for the landowner, who another employee knew would be entering and
exiting the barn, opened a barn door. We decline to apply the hazardous-work rule here.
Primary Assumption of Risk and Comparative Fault
Whitewater argues that, even if it owed Pries a duty of care, he assumed the risk of
injury. The doctrine of primary assumption of risk bars a plaintiff’s claim by negating the
defendant’s duty of care. Soderberg v. Anderson, 922 N.W.2d 200, 203 (Minn. 2019).
Primary assumption of risk exists “only where parties have voluntarily entered a
relationship in which plaintiff assumes well-known, incidental risks.” Id. (quotation
omitted). The doctrine does not apply here. The supreme court recently observed that it has
limited the implied-primary-assumption doctrine to only certain types of situations,
“largely in the arena of participants and spectators of inherently dangerous sports.” Henson
v. Uptown Drink, LLC , 922 N.W.2d 185, 191 (Minn. 2019) (quotation omitted). And it
emphasized in Soderberg that it was “loathe to extend the doctrine . . . to yet another
activity.” 922 N.W.2d at 205. Because applications of the primary assumption of risk are
few and limited mostly to the sport context, we decline to apply the doctrine for the first
time to the circumstances here. And Pries correctly emphasizes that apportionment of
comparative fault is generally a question for the jury. See Nimis v. St. Paul Turners, 521
N.W.2d 54, 59 (Minn. App. 1994).
Because the record presents a fact question about whether Whitewater should have
anticipated harm to Pries , the district court erred by concluding as a matter of law that
Whitewater owed him no duty of care as a landowner. This question, as well as Pries’s role
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in causing his injury, is for the jury. We offer no opinion on the consequent issue of whether
Whitewater breached any duty to him.
Reversed and remanded.