North Dakota Writes Server Training Into the Damages Analysis

Last reviewed September 2026

North Dakota is one of very few states whose dram shop statute addresses server training directly — and it does so twice, once as a mitigating factor on exemplary damages and once as a bar on the plaintiff using it.

N.D.C.C. § 5-01-06.1

Section 5-01-06.1 replaced a repealed predecessor and sits in Title 5, North Dakota’s alcoholic beverages title. It creates a claim for relief for fault, routed through the state’s comparative fault provision.

North Dakota's claim runs against a person “who knowingly disposes, sells, barters, or gives away alcoholic beverages to an individual under twenty-one years of age or to an incompetent or an obviously intoxicated individual,” in favour of anyone injured by that obviously intoxicated individual.

Standard for liability

The conduct element is “knowingly disposes, sells, barters, or gives away,” and the condition of the recipient is one of three: under twenty-one, incompetent, or “obviously intoxicated.”

Two things follow. The knowledge requirement attaches to the disposal rather than to the recipient’s condition on the face of the wording, which counsel should read carefully against the facts and the current text. And the plaintiff must have been injured by an obviously intoxicated individual — the opening words of the subsection — which sets the observability threshold for the claim as a whole.

Because the claim is routed through comparative fault, the conduct of the intoxicated individual and of the injured person are in issue alongside the disposal.

Social hosts

The section runs against “any person” who knowingly disposes of, sells, barters or gives away alcoholic beverages to a person in one of the three described conditions. That wording is not confined to licensees.

The section does, however, single out retail licensees for the training provisions described below, which indicates the drafters had the licensed trade in view for that part. Counsel should read the subsections against the specific defendant.

Minors

An individual under twenty-one is the first of the three recipient conditions, alongside an incompetent person and an obviously intoxicated individual.

The claim still requires that the plaintiff was injured by an obviously intoxicated individual. So in a North Dakota underage case the age of the recipient supplies the conduct element, while the obviousness of the intoxication supplies the injury element — two separate findings from different evidence.

Training, responsible-vendor, and safe-harbor provisions

This is where North Dakota departs from every other state on this list.

North Dakota is one of the few states to write server training into the damages analysis. Where exemplary damages are sought, the finder of fact “may consider as a mitigating factor that the licensee provided to an employee alcohol server training that addressed intoxication, drunk driving, and underage drinking” — and a plaintiff “may not use the fact that the retail licensee provided this training to prove culpability.”

Read together, those two provisions create an asymmetry counsel should understand before discovery. A licensee that trained its staff has a mitigating factor available against exemplary damages. A plaintiff cannot turn that same training into proof of culpability — cannot, for instance, argue that because the staff were trained they must have known better.

What the provisions do not do is bar the plaintiff from examining whether the training was real, whether it reached the staff who served, and whether it was current. The statute protects the fact of training from being used as proof of culpability; it does not make the training file undiscoverable or its adequacy unexaminable.

Operational evidence commonly examined in North Dakota cases

• The training records themselves with dates per employee — both sides need them, for opposite purposes.
• Whether the training “addressed intoxication, drunk driving, and underage drinking,” which is the statutory description the mitigation depends on.
• Video and witness evidence going to whether the intoxication was obvious, which the opening words of the subsection require.
• Distributor invoices and inventory counts, which bound volume in a venue that kept little else.
• Payroll start dates, establishing how long each person on the schedule had worked there.
• Whether the plaintiff falls within either excluded class, established at intake.
• Cash reconciliation and till totals where the trade was substantially cash.

The expert’s role

North Dakota is the state where an operations expert’s reading of a training file matters most, because the statute gives that file a defined role in the damages analysis. The question is not whether certificates exist but whether the training addressed what the statute describes and reached the people who poured. Preston Rideout holds two North Dakota alcohol-service certifications and has built and audited training programmes for operators, which is the basis for assessing whether a programme was real or documentary.

Preston Rideout completed Techniques of Alcohol Management (TAM) for North Dakota; what that lets him evaluate in a North Dakota matter, and the records it makes discoverable, is set out at North Dakota certified expert witness.

Primary sources

• N.D.C.C. § 5-01-06.1(1), ndlegis.gov
• N.D.C.C. § 5-01-06.1(1)–(2), ndlegis.gov
• N.D.C.C. § 5-01-06.1(3), ndlegis.gov

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