About Slip and Fall Accident Claims

Slip and fall accident claims arise when a person falls down and is injured due to a pre-existing hazard that a property owner or manager should have fixed. Classic slip and fall accidents often occur in stairwells, sidewalks, showers and bathtubs, on parking ramps, or in falls from balconies.

What Makes a Typical Slip-and-Fall Accident Claim?

A typical slip and fall case looks like this: A person is climbing stairs where a liquid was spilled. The person slips in the liquid and is injured. The injured person can sue the property owner or manager for money to pay for the injury arguing that the property owner should have cleaned up the liquid and the liquid caused the injury.

In these cases, courts have found that property owners have a duty to use reasonable care to keep the property reasonably safe. Based on this duty, courts often award the injured money to help with the injury.

Could You Be Awarded Damages After a Slip-and-Fall?

Before a court will award what lawyers call “damages” (money for an injury) to an injured person, the injured person must prove to a judge or jury three things. First, the injured person must prove that the property where the injury was sustained was not in a reasonably safe condition. In the example above, the injured person must prove that there was, in fact, liquid on the stairs and then prove that the liquid made the stairs unsafe.

After this, the injured person must prove that the property owner was negligent in failing to keep the property in a reasonably safe condition. Negligence is defined as “the lack of ordinary care.” A negligent person fails to use the kind of care that a normal person would use in a similar situation.

In the stair-climbing example, the injured person must prove that a reasonable property owner would have recognized the danger in the liquid on the stairs and then took reasonable actions to clean the liquid up making the stairs safe to climb again.

The last thing an injured person must prove for a successful slip and fall claim is that the unsafe condition was a substantial factor in the injury. The unsafe condition is considered a substantial factor in an injury if a reasonable person would conclude that the unsafe condition caused the injury.

To use the stair-climbing example, again, the injured person must prove that the liquid on the stairs that the property owner negligently failed to clean up was the cause of the injury.