Slip & Fall

When accidents happen, it’s not always readily apparent who is at fault. No one wants to get hurt when they visit a place of business or a restaurant, and no business is going to willfully create a slip and fall hazard on the premises. Slip and fall injuries do happen though, and most are preventable when businesses follow proper slip and fall hazard safety.

Regardless of how the slip and fall occurred, some slip and fall injuries are severe and require months or years of treatment and physical therapy to make a full recovery. Moreover, treatment and medical care don’t even begin to cover the pain, suffering, time and work lost due to an extended recovery. It can feel like you just have to grit your teeth and get through it. In reality, nothing could be further from the truth.

What Are Your Options?

You may be legally entitled to financial compensation for the losses your injury incurred, and you should explore your legal recourse for your injury case. Personal injury cases involving a fall due to hazardous conditions are nothing to take lightly, and there is a proscribed process involved in obtaining compensation for your injuries and related expenses through legal action. Here’s an overview of what’s involved in a slip and fall personal injury case, as well as criteria for a judgment in your favor.

Qualifying Conditions

There are specific dangerous conditions that must be present on the premises for your case in order for a court to determine legal liability for your injury. The following are generally considered dangerous conditions that could contribute to owner liability in a slip and fall personal injury case:

• Torn carpeting
• Changes in flooring
• Wet flooring
• Narrow stairs
• Cracked or broken sidewalk/flooring/asphalt
• Poor lighting.

If one of the above is the cause of your slip and fall injury, you may have a case for compensation. To receive said compensation though, you and your attorney will have to prove liability.

Proving Liability in Slip and Fall Injury Cases

There are no specific methods to prove that a property owner is legally responsible for a slip and fall injury. Your case is made or broken on whether the property owner took precautions to prevent slipping or falling. The other criteria involved is whether you as the injured party took proper precautions to avoid slipping and falling, or if you were injured due to your own inattentiveness.

Proving owner liability involves demonstrating to the court that your injury was the result of a hazardous condition and that the property owner had knowledge of a hazardous condition. Furthermore, the hazardous condition also must present an unreasonable risk to persons or property, and it must be a hazardous condition you as the injured party should not have anticipated given the circumstances at the time of injury.

Owners are considered to have knowledge of a hazardous condition under the following criteria:

• The owner created a hazardous condition.
• The owner knew about the hazardous condition and neglected to correct it.
• The condition existed for so long the owner should have found and corrected the hazardous condition before your slip and fall injury occurred.

Provided one or any of those criteria apply to your situation, the property owner may be held liable and ordered by the court to arrange for compensation for your injury.

Have you suffered a slip and fall injury? Are you uncertain whether you have a case? Michigan locals should contact Remond Atie, PLLC for a consultation regarding their options for pursuing a case to receive compensation for injury associated expenses. Don’t wait, call today and find out more about your rights as the injured party today.