Slip & Fall

Cincinnati Slip and Fall Injury Attorneys

We Fight to Hold Negligent Ohio Property Owners Accountable for All Types of Slip, Trip and Fall Injuries

Business owners, residential property owners, apartment managers and anyone else responsible for maintaining a safe premises have a duty to legal visitors of all types. You are entitled to feel and be safe when you legally enter someone else’s property, whether it’s a private home, apartment complex, retail store or office building.

When a property owner fails to uphold their duty and guests, employees or customers are injured as a result, they should be held financially accountable for the injuries they cause.

There are essentially four elements people injured in slip and fall incidents need to prove in order to bring a successful injury claim against the property owner or other responsible parties:

Duty of care: The plaintiff must demonstrate that the business (defendant) had a duty to provide a safe environment for its customers or visitors. Businesses generally have an obligation to maintain their premises in a reasonably safe condition and to warn or correct any known hazards.

While this may seem straightforward, it’s not always easy to prove you were actually on the property when the injury occurred unless you reported the injury or have some type of proof that you were at the location when you slipped or tripped and fell. This is why reporting the incident, gathering picture and video evidence and creating a paper trail is often vital in slip and fall cases.

Breach of duty: The plaintiff must show that the defendant breached their duty of care. This could involve demonstrating that the business knew or should have known about the dangerous condition and failed to take appropriate action to either fix the hazard or warn visitors about it.

This can be a particularly complicated and complex point of contention in slip and fall cases. Does putting out a wet floor sign shield a business from all liability if someone were to slip on the floor? Not necessarily, like in a situation where an employee didn’t put the sign somewhere clearly visible to customers walking down aisles.

Disputes also often arise over whether the injured person’s inattention was the primary cause of the slip, like if you were looking down at your phone instead of where you were walking. Property owners may try to argue you were primarily responsible for your own injuries due to your behavior.

The breach of duty led to the injury: The plaintiff must establish that the defendant’s breach of duty directly caused their injury. This means proving a clear link between the dangerous condition on the premises and the slip and fall accident. This is why it’s vital to both report the injury to the property owner as soon as it happened and seek medical attention right away. Taking these steps can help ensure there’s a clear line between the incident and your injuries.

Damages: Finally, the plaintiff must demonstrate they suffered actual damages as a result of the slip and fall. This can include medical expenses, lost wages, pain and suffering and other losses. It’s important to recognize filing a claim or pursuing litigation may be difficult if your damages are minimal or non-existent. Feeling personally aggrieved by the negligence of a property owner isn’t adequate justification for filing a claim if you suffered no quantifiable damages.

Factors to Consider When Pursuing a Slip and Fall Claim

Without adequate evidence slip and fall claims can turn into he-said-she-said situations where the injured person swears there was a hazard and the business owner says the hazard doesn’t exist or the injury didn’t occur at their premises.

Past similar incidents may be useful in establishing a pattern of negligent behavior (like if you trip in a pothole in a business’s parking lot and other people have filed similar claims recently).

There may be scenarios where you lose a claim dispute even though:

• The business doesn’t dispute there was a hazard
• You were able to document it
• You can even establish that the hazard directly led to your injuries and resulted in damages

It’s necessary for the dangerous condition to have existed for a sufficient amount of time that the business should have been aware of it and taken action. If the hazard occurred 30 seconds before you slipped and fell, the business can likely successfully argue it would be unreasonable to expect them to discover and fix the hazard prior to your injury.

However, you may still have a claim if you can show that the hazard was due to a business’s failure to follow industry standards or safety protocols, like precariously stacking glass bottles in a way that made it likely someone would knock them over, trip and suffer serious injuries.