Can You Sue Someone For Slipping And Getting Injured On Their Property?
Just because you didn't collide or directly engage with another person doesn't mean no one is liable for your injuries. Property owners are required by premises liability legislation to make every effort to ensure that their grounds are adequately maintained and safe. If an unfortunate slip and fall accident occurs on their property and the owner is deemed negligent, they may be considered liable for the victim's medical bills, lost wages, and other expenses.
Slip and Falls are more common than you think. Unlike car accidents, slipping and falling almost feels like a personal error. However, a lot of slips and falls can't just be attributed to a victim's carelessness.
Here's a list of places where slip and fall cases normally occur:
A grocery store
Newly mopped floors
Poolside
Someone else's property
All the above examples have the same theme: the victim is on someone else's premises. Whether it's a commercial storefront or someone's private pool, slip and fall cases in California are attributed to negligence on the part of the property owner.
That said, if you get injured due to someone failing or refusing to address hazards in their premises, then you have grounds to hire a California Slip And Fall Attorney. Additionally, slip and falls can be as potentially dangerous a vehicular accidents—it has been known to lead to spinal cord injuries, brain and head trauma, and other catastrophic injuries.
How to Prove Negligence of the Property Owner
If you want the property owner to pay you compensation after you slip and fall, you must be able to prove that they were negligent in their duty of care to you. Unfortunately, simply slipping and falling in someone's home or place of business is insufficient to establish a solid claim because your fall could be your fault.
However, you have enough grounds if you and your California Personal Injury Attorney can:
Establish that the property owner's negligence put you in an unreasonable amount of danger.
You made reasonable efforts to prevent it.
To be deemed negligent, a property owner or manager must have:
The property owner caused the safety hazard, or they allowed it to go unaddressed for an unreasonable amount of time.
They were fully aware of the hazard or should have been aware of it if they had been more alert.
Inadequately addressed the hazard or did nothing about it at all.
You'll need evidence for when you claim someone's negligence. If you can't gather evidence at the scene, your California Personal Injury Lawyer can do separate investigations for you.
How Do Property Owners Defend Themselves?
If you are harmed and file a Slip and Fall Claim against a property owner, the property owner will almost always try to pin the responsibility on you, the victim.
The following are some of the defenses that property owners can use against premises liability claims:
The victim was oblivious to their surroundings because they were distracted.
The victim was in an area or a location where the public was not permitted or expected to be present.
The victim was wearing ill-fitting or dangerous footwear.
Yellow cones and caution flags denoted the danger zone.
To a normal, average person, the danger should have been evident.
If you are injured in a recent slip-and-fall accident, and your liability case gets to trial, California's "pure comparative negligence" criterion applies to determine how much money you can get.
Whatever damages a victim receives under pure comparative negligence will be lowered by the percentage of the victim's own share of the blame.
Although most premises liability cases are settled out of court before a trial, insurance providers and property owners sometimes refuse to settle. So if you are injured in a slip-and-fall accident, and your case cannot be settled out of court, a jury or judge will decide whether:
The premises owner should have known (or did know) about the hazards that caused your injury.
The premises owner did or did not have a reasonable understanding of how hazardous it was.
Regardless of the property owner's efforts to push all the blame from you, a California Personal Injury Lawyer will have the skill and experience to fight for your right to compensation.
What Is The Statute Of Limitations Of Slip And Falls In California?
The statute of limitations for slip and falls in California is two years. Therefore, you will not be able to recover damages if you do not bring your lawsuit within two years of the slip-and-fall injury.
In any case, you don't want to wait two years after a slip-and-fall injury to file a lawsuit and then rush to do it before the deadline. Instead, after you've been medically cleared, contact an expert California Personal Injury Attorney straight away to discuss your legal options.
Find A Slip and Fall Attorney in California
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