You slip and fall on someone else’s property, and you suffer a serious injury. Maybe you strike your head on the way down, one of the more common ways that a traumatic brain injury (TBI) can take place. Maybe you break a bone or suffer internal injuries. Whatever the case, you weren’t injured before and you were clearly injured in the slip and fall accident, so you tell the property owner that they need to cover your medical bills.
That property owner tells you that it’s your own fault that you slipped and fell. They feel bad for you, but they don’t think it was their fault in any way, so they don’t want to cover those bills. How do you determine if they are actually liable and when and how can you hold them accountable?
Were they negligent in some way?
The key question to ask here is if the property owner was negligent and if that led to your accident.
In some cases, that may mean that they acted intentionally in a way that proved to be dangerous. For instance, perhaps you slipped and fell on an outdoor staircase that didn’t have a banister. The property owner had taken it down because they didn’t like the way that it looked, but they never put a new one up. This creates a dangerous condition that makes it more likely that you could fall and removes critical safety equipment that would have made the building up to code.
In other cases, they may have simply been negligent by failing to act. Perhaps you slipped on a wet patch caused by a leaking pipe. The property owner knew that the pipe was leaking but never bothered to fix it. They clearly didn’t cause the leak, but their neglect of general maintenance and repair caused you to be injured.
Could that property owner foresee that what they did or failed to do would have caused an injury? Should they have foreseen it, even if they claim that they had no idea? Would a reasonable person have known that this condition needed to be changed in order to keep people safe on the property?
These are the types of questions that you’re going to need to ask. If it does turn out that the property owner was negligent and caused your injuries in some way, then you also want to find out about the legal steps you can take to seek the compensation you deserve.
