One of the most common inquiries we receive is from people who have been injured in a commercial establishment. Usually there is fall on the premises and claim that the business was somehow negligent. One of my first questions to anyone who calls to speak with me about a fall at a commercial establishment is “Why did you fall?”. In any accident that occurs on commercial property there is usually a chain of events which will determine whether the injured victim receives any benefits.
A typical scenario is someone who falls in a store, and is injured. The manager of the store is called, along with an ambulance, and before the ambulance arrives the injured victim provides information to the store manager, and then is taken from the store on a stretcher. Once the injured accident victim begins to call the store, there is no response from the store and all the while the medical expenses begin to mount. By the time the injured party calls a lawyer, it might very well be too late to help.
By and large, the owner of a commercial establishment (i.e. a store) will be responsible to someone on their property if the store owner or its employees knew or should have known about a defect on the premises which could reasonably be expected to cause injury.
What might be a defect? If there is produce all over the floor of the grocery store which hasn’t been cleaned up; or water on the floor from a chronically leaking refrigerator/freezer; loose/missing floor tiles; a spill of some liquid on the floor which has been tracked through the store without anyone taking the time to clean it up, even a bathroom that hasn’t been cleaned with wet, slippery floors. The key in any of these cases is that the store’s employees knew or should have known about the dangerous condition.
In Virginia, Maryland, and Washington, D.C., these types of claims are problematic as all three of these jurisdictions are contributory negligence jurisdictions. If the injured accident victim caused or contributed to their injury, then their claim is barred. Any large chain store in the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area has polices in place to minimize their incidence of injuries. Bathrooms are checked every 30 minutes, aisles are checked and cleaned if necessary, broken/leaking equipment is taken out of harm’s way. When someone is hurt, there are set procedures in terms of how to deal with the injured party and what types of information they try to elicit from the injured victim before he or she leaves the store. In many instances the store manager will encourage the injured victim to go to the hospital to make sure that the victim can’t come up with new complaints later on.
One of the most important factors in any premise liability case is what caused the fall. Without some smoking gun as to why the person fell, it becomes difficult, if not impossible to prove liability on the part of the commercial establishment. One of the best results I was able to accomplish was a case where the woman saved her clothes following her fall at Walmart. The fact that they had become soaked with the dish detergent that had spilled in the aisle went a long way towards proving our case and allowed us to obtain a good result
