Slip and Fall Liability on Your Property
Everyone slips and falls from time to time, but these common slip and falls can end up being serious injuries. Personal injury lawyers handle many slip and fall cases. If your slip and fall accident happens on someone else’s property, the property owner may be held liable for your accident. So what happens if a slip and fall accident happens on your property?
Who Is Responsible?
The first step in a slip and fall accident is determining liability. If someone slips and falls on your property due to their own negligence, then you may not be held liable. However, if someone slips and falls on your property due to a dangerous condition that you knew about, you could very well be in trouble. These dangerous conditions could include an icy driveway or sidewalk, a dangerous flight of stairs or even an uneven floor. If you knew these conditions existed and didn’t do anything to fix them, you might have someone else’s personal injury lawyer open a case against you.
Is the Claim Reasonable?
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Determining liability in these scenarios is almost common sense but there are other factors that could influence liability. How long did the dangerous condition exist, and did the property owner have time to fix it? Was the victim being careless in their actions and did the property owner try to help the victim or fix the situation? In addition, did your own carelessness contribute to the accident?
Property Owner’s Carelessness
To avoid slip and fall injuries on your property, try to keep a neat and clean property as much as possible. The risk of someone injuring themselves on your property is much higher if you don’t keep your property clean. If someone is attempting to hold you liable for their injury, then you need to assess your own actions and decide if they were careless or not.
Was there a legitimate reason for the dangerous area on your property? If a person was being careful, would they have seen the dangerous area and avoided it? Did you have any warnings of the dangerous area, or were you also distracted and didn’t think to warn the victim of the dangerous area?
If you were being careless as a property owner, you could be held liable for someone’s slip and fall injury. If you were being careful and keep a clean property, a personal injury lawyer won’t be able to accuse you of much if someone is trying to hold you liable for something that wasn’t your fault.
Slip and fall accidents happen all the time but in order to avoid them on your property, make sure you fix any dangerous areas that could cause an accident. If you have injured yourself on someone else’s property due to their negligence in maintaining their property, make sure to contact a personal injury lawyer today to get started on a claim.
Colette Prusse is a legal writer for for Fusion 360, an SEO and content marketing agency. Information provided by Robert J. DeBry and Associates.
