How to Place Fault in a Slip and Fall Lawsuit
Thousands get injured annually, some of them seriously, after slipping and falling on surfaces such as floor or stairs that are slippery and dangerous. Although compensation to victims of slip and fall injuries is supported by personal injury law, placing fault on the property owner is not always that clear cut. Below are ways a personal injury lawyer can try to demonstrate that a building owner is at fault for injuries sustained in a slip and fall case:
3 Conditions for Proving Liability
When you’ve suffered slip and fall injury on someone else’s property due to a perilous situation, you most likely have a valid case in a court of law if you can prove the following conditions to exist:
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1. Either the owner of the property or his employee should have been aware of the risky condition that led to the victim’s slip and fall injury because someone reasonable in the circumstances would have known about it and fixed it, preventing the accident.
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2. Either the person owning the property or their staff did acknowledge the dangerous situation but did not resolve it.
3. Either the owner of the property or their staff did cause the hazardous condition that resulted in slip and fall injury to the complainant.
The Issue of Reasonableness
When you’re on court mission to prove that a property owner is legally responsible for your slip and fall injuries, you’ll most probably have to demonstrate, at some point, the reasonableness of the defendant’s actions or inaction. In an incidence where a leaking roof over a stairwell is the root cause of the accident, for instance, how long the problem has been there uncorrected can show how reasonable the accused is. When the defect has been unattended for the past four months, it is less sensible that the property owner allowed it to stay unrepaired than it would have been if it had occurred only the night before the accident and the owner could not have fixed it before it had stopped raining.
To stand a chance of placing fault on the property owner, you’ll need to show that they had the legal duty of reasonable care to act quickly and fix a dangerous situation within their property. An example is a landlord not being at fault when a tenant trips over a rake on a yard since the object does not have to be always removed.
It may be difficult to make the case for slip and fall injury compensation in court, but there are circumstances that can be proved with the assistance of a great lawyer to apportion fault to the property owner.