Premises Liability Claim
If you have been injured on someone else's property due to the fault of another, and are considering filing a claim against the responsible party(ies), there are certain procedural matters of which you should be aware, and which you should discuss with an attorney. First, every state has a "statute of limitations," which limits the amount of time one has to bring a personal injury action. The majority of states require that you file suit within three years from the date your "claim accrued," which is typically the date of the injury.
Importantly, if you were injured on public property, most states require that you give notice to the appropriate governmental entity, such as the city, within a very short time period - sometimes within as little as 30 days from the date of injury. If you fail to give the appropriate notice or bring your legal action within the relevant timeframes, you might lose your ability to recover for your injuries altogether. Consequently, it is very important to contact an attorney as soon as you are injured to ensure that your rights are fully protected.
Liability Rules
The law of negligence applies to slip and fall cases, and a key issue in most cases is what duty the property owner owed the injured person in terms of protecting him or her from injury. Traditionally, the law distinguished among four categories of people who might be on someone else's property: 1) invitees (for example, a delivery person); 2) social guests; 3) licensees (someone who is on the property solely for their own benefit); and, 4) trespassers (for example, a vandal), and the amount of care the property owner was required to exercise to protect a person from injury depended on how the person was categorized.
The courts in Texas hold property owners to the same standard with respect to everyone: a duty to exercise reasonable care in maintaining their property and to warn people of hazards.
In most cases, an injured party must prove that the subject premises was in a "dangerous condition" when the injury occurred, and that the owner or possessor of the property knew of the dangerous condition. To constitute a dangerous condition, the premises defect must present an unreasonable risk to a person on the property, and it must have been a condition that the injured party should not have anticipated under the circumstances. The latter element indicates that people must be aware of, and avoid, obvious dangers.
In order to establish that a property owner or possessor knew of a dangerous condition, it must be shown that: 1) the owner created the condition; 2) the owner knew the condition existed and negligently failed to correct it; or, 3) the condition existed for such a length of time that the owner should have discovered and corrected it prior to the incident in question.
For a property owner or possessor to be held liable, it must have been foreseeable that his negligence would create the danger at issue. For instance, if a can of paint falls to the ground and spills into an aisle in a hardware store and, one day later, the store has not noticed or cleaned up the spill, and someone slips in the paint and is injured, one might argue it was foreseeable that the store's negligence in failing to inspect its aisles and clean up spills would result in someone slipping and injuring himself on a spilled item.
Responsible Parties
For someone to recover for an injury sustained on another's property, there must be a responsible party whose negligence caused the injury. This sounds obvious, but many people do not realize that some injuries are simply accidents caused, if anything, by their own carelessness. For instance, if someone falls simply because he was not looking where he was walking, he cannot recover against the property owner if the owner was in no way at fault, no matter how serious the injury. If an injured person is only partially at fault for his own injury, he might still be able to recover from another, but the dollar amount of his recovery might be reduced.
In slip and fall cases, there are often a number of people or entities that may be held responsible for someone's injuries. For instance, if a business rents space from a property owner, both the property owner and the tenant (the business) may be named as defendants by someone injured on the property. In that case, the tenant is known as a possessor of the property, and has a duty to use reasonable care to prevent injury to those on the premises under its control. A possessor might also be a party who manages or maintains the property, such as a management company.
In residential settings as well, landlords may be held liable to tenants or third parties for injuries caused by dangerous or defective conditions on rental property. To hold a landlord responsible for an injury, a tenant must show:
- That the landlord had control over the problem that caused the injury;
- That repairing the problem would not have been unreasonably expensive
or difficult;
- That a serious injury was the foreseeable consequence of not fixing the
problem; and,
- That the landlord's failure to take reasonable steps to avoid the accident
caused the tenant's injury.
When an injury occurs on property owned by a local, state, or federal government entity, special rules will apply, and it is important to consult an attorney to protect your rights. Specifically, there are very stringent notice requirements and broad immunity provisions that sometimes shield government entities from liability for injuries that occur on their property.
