Slip and Fall Personal Injury Settlements

Everyone slips or falls at some point in their life, but this does not mean that people can always sue�to obtain a�personal injury settlement for their injuries. However, more and more "Slip and Fall" personal injury settlements are won each year due to recent media coverage on the issue and a call-to-action by the public.

A Slip and Fall personal injury is sustained when someone slips, trips or falls on another person or entity's property. This could be a home, a place of business or private land owned by someone else. In order to win compensation for the injury, the injured person must prove that the owner or manager of the property caused the circumstance in which the fall was taken and�that the owner or manager knew of the situation and failed to correct it. In some cases, a personal injury settlement can also be won if the dangerous condition existed for a long period of the time, and that the owner or manager should have been aware of the situation, and was therefore negligent.

Dangerous Conditions

In order to prove a personal injury fault, Slip and Fall victims must be able to prove that dangerous or negligent conditions existed and caused the accident. For example, if the florist at a grocery store spills water on the floor and fails to clean it up or put a sign out to warn customers, anyone who slips and falls in the spilled water may have a case against the grocery store for dangerous conditions on the property.

Similarly, cities and counties have been sued in the past for failing to fix broken sidewalks or providing insufficient lighting in the stairwells of public buildings. Dangerous conditions can also include torn or broken flooring, ice on pathways to businesses, freshly mopped floors without "Wet Floor" signs, and others.

Carelessness

Even if dangerous conditions exist, the plaintiff must also prove that the injury was not�sustained due to carelessness. For example, if you walk into a store and the owner tells you that the floors are wet, and there are signs on the floor, and you are advised to return later after the floor is dry, you cannot slip and fall and then sue the store owner for negligence. Likewise, you cannot go to a public pool and slip and fall on the cement, intending to sue. You entered the pool knowing that there was water on the cement, and therefore the fall was due to your own carelessness, and not negligence on the part of the owner of the property.

Negligence

As I stated before, a personal injury suit can only be won for a Slip and Fall accident if the owner or manager of the property has exhibited negligence. This means that the owner or manager knew or should have known about the dangerous condition, and still did nothing to fix it.

For example, if a store owner spills a can of paint and fails to clean it up for three days, anyone who slips and falls in the paint can legally sue for personal injury damages. On the other hand, if the store owner spills the can of paint and a customer slips and falls in it right then, the case will probably not merit compensation. The store owner had not yet exhibited negligence because there was not time to clean it up, and the customer exhibited carelessness because he or she saw the can of paint spill. As you can see, there is a very fine line in this type of personal injury settlement.

Building Code Violations

This is an increasingly common source of Slip and Fall personal injury settlements. When an owner or management company fails to keep its building up to code, accidents that occur on the premesis are subject to personal injury settlements. This is called "liability," and has no concrete definitions.

In this type of situation, the property is usually commercial in nature, and may have several responsible parties. Because of leases of buildings, the owner of the property might not necessarily be the entity that manages the building, but both parties may be named in a law suit. It is the judge or jury's job to decide which party is most responsible, and to award compensation appropriately.

Building code violations include, but are not limited to:

- Narrow or unlit stairwells
- Out-of-order escalators
- Unlit or improperly maintained elevators
- Torn, ripped or cracked flooring
- Insufficiently secured lighting fixtures (that fall)

In these types of cases, carelessness is usually not taken into consideration. If a person takes a stairway that is narrow and has no lights, when other stairwells were accessible, and he or she slips and falls, personal injury settlements might still be obtained. Even though the person was careless in entering the stairwell, the building code violation is sufficient to warrant responsibility of the owner or manager.