A few times a year, someone will call me and advise that they want to hire me to get them money as they fell at a store; however, the client did not go to any doctor and the client is not claiming any sort of injury.
Slip and Fall accidents happpen in people homes, in local businesses, in strip malls business, in retail mall outlets and essentially at any property. My law firm can help when someone is INJURED in a fall and where there is liablity against the landowner/land occupier. This area of law is called premises liability, meaning liability of the landowner or occupier of someone that is on those premises.
The first thing that is important to understand in this area of law is that Florida law is clear that the owner or occupier of property is not automatically responsibly just because someone is injured on the property. This seems to be one of the most common misconceptions of this area of law. People believe that SOLELY because they were injured on the property, that business owes them for medical bills and so forth. i can tell you that the law states, generally, that negligence must be proven before a business owes someone for medical bills, pain and suffering, etc. For example, if someone trips on their own shoe laces at a business and thus it is the person’s fault as opposed to the fault of the business, they would generally not have a case to recover money resulting for that fall AS THE INJURY IS NOT THE BUSINESS’S FAULT!
People ask me: if there is water or some liquid on the floor, does that mean that the business owes them for medical bills, pain and suffering, lost wages, etc.? Again the answer is maybe. If the water is leaking from a refrigerator or air conditioner that the business knew about, then this would be a strong case for liability against the business. However, if there is videotape (and nowadays video is very common) and if two minutes before the person fell, another customer spilled some liquid on the floor and this is what caused the fall, then this would be a much more difficult case. The reason this case would be more difficult is that, as against the business, they would be able to argue that there was nothing that could be done to prevent the accident and therefore they are not liable. In general, fall cases on transient liquids are “failure to warn” cases, unless it can be shown that the business or one of it’s employees put the liquid on the ground, knew about it or the liquid came from an air conditioner in the business, etc. So if the video would show that the spill was just a few minutes before the fall, then it would be hard for the injured person to argue that the business “failed to warn” as likely it would be determined that there was not enough time for them to warn.
Another issue in the slip and fall cases is what is known as comparative fault, which is the legal position that while the defendant (landowner or business in the cases I am discussing here) is at fault, the plaintiff (the injured person) is also at fault and thus fault should be apportioned. I will discuss this issue further in another post, so please look out for other posts on comparative fault.
There is obviously a lot of information here and of course every injury case is unique. My law firm offers free consultations on accident cases like the ones described above and for car accident cases. This advise is based on Florida law and other states laws may vary significantly from Florida.
