When are you likely to recover damages for a slip-and-fall injury?

The crucial element in proving a slip-and-fall case is demonstrating that the owner or other entity responsible for maintaining the property on which you slipped and fell was negligent in maintaining his/her property in a reasonably safe way.

Generally, if you are a customer on a property (for instance, if you are shopping at a store), the owner of that business has a higher duty to protect you not only from the conditions that the owner knew of but also the ones that he had a reason to know of. In other words, if a reasonable business owner would have known of a certain dangerous condition and would have taken steps to prevent it or fix it, but the property owner in your incident failed to do so, you are likely to be entitled to a recovery.

Let’s compare and contrast two different slip-and-fall scenarios, one of which is likely to give rise to the property owner’s liability for an injury, while in the other case the injured person is unlikely to prevail in his/her case against the property owner:

1. John goes into a pharmacy store in San Francisco and while trying to pick out a shampoo in the hair-products isle, he slips and falls on a spilled hair lotion. The investigation shows that the lotion was spilled when the store’s employee was unpacking and placing the hair product on the shelf and that employee didn’t thoroughly clean the area before leaving and didn’t put a warning sign in that area as often required. Under these circumstances, John has a good chance to win his slip-and-fall case against the store, because it was ultimately the store’s responsibility to maintain the shopping area in a safe manner and the store’s employee was negligent by failing to maintain the safe conditions in the store or warn customers against a dangerous condition.

2. Brad goes into a grocery store and while walking through the magazines isle, slips and falls on blueberry jam that was spilled by a customer 5 minutes before the incident. The investigation reveals that the store has a strict policy of having its employee walk through the store and inspect the floor and the shelves every hour. Under this circumstances, Brad will have a hard time to recover for his slip-and-fall injuries. First, the store owner didn’t create the dangerous condition; one of the customers did. Secondly and even more importantly, the store was probably not negligent because it did what a reasonable person would have done to maintain its property by requiring frequent and periodic inspections throughout the store. Arkady Itkin, Esq.