Ep 88: Navigating Slip and Fall Cases in North Carolina

I'm Clark, speaks the catastrophic injury lawyer. Welcome to the verdict. This is anatomy of a personal injury case. Jeff, we talk about slip and fall cases. Slip and fall cases are those cases where a person is injured on the premises of another person or a business or whatever. What are the things that are necessary in order to be able to have a successful slip and fall case. Slip and fall cases are very difficult in North Carolina, because you have to prove a lot of different things. You have to prove that the condition that someone's slipped on or got hurt on wasn't something they should have seen and avoided, wasn't obvious. You also have to point out at the same time that it's obvious enough for the business where this happened that they should have known about it, right? So that's a little tricky, right? It's not so obvious that I can see it, but it's obvious enough that they should have seen it and should have done something about it, but didn't, right, and that they had a reasonable opportunity to fix it, right? If I'm walking through the grocery store and a child spills water right in front of me, and it's a lot of water, and they should see that a lot of water, but I'm coming around the corner 10 seconds later, the store hasn't had an opportunity to fix that's not a reasonable opportunity to fix that. So there's a lot of different elements in there that we have to prove to make these cases stand. So it has to be a hidden danger to me, but something that the business knew or should have known about and had a reasonable opportunity to fix it. Okay. And then, and then also, one of the things that's different about it, about these kinds of cases, is the idea that in a car car accident, there's a police report, and the police officer will do an investigation and will assign this person was responsible and this person was not responsible. That's not the case in these in these premises liability slip and fall type cases, is it? Now, because there's no police coming out to investigate, the only investigation that's done is by the premises where you got hurt, and sometimes they don't even do an investigation, and usually the video of the accident they have, and they won't give to us. So we can get that later if we have to file a lawsuit, but we can't get it up front well, and one of the things we have to do is to immediately send out what's called a spoliation letter under those circumstances to make sure that they don't destroy that evidence so that we can access that evidence later, and then we can have other ways to preserve evidence that will be very important later. What about in terms of damages? What are the types of damages that are recoverable in these sort of slip and fall premises liability type cases? Well, there's sort of two subsets to this kind of case. There's the sort of standard slip and fall, or I stepped in some kind of a whole kind of a situation, you know, something that I couldn't see. In those cases, you're looking at medical bills, economic losses, pain and suffering, different things like that. There's another subset, which is sort, we sort of call premises liability, and that may be more of a industrial accident, you know, I'm working for my employer at somebody else's factory, and a forklift,

you know, runs over me and takes, you know, hurts and damages my legs permanently. That's not really a slip and fall, but it is a premises liability case, and maybe a lot more serious case at that point, and there could be a workers compensation piece to that as well. We have workers compensation team that's fantastic that will work with our liability teams to work together on those test cases. It's important that those two entities work hand in hand, to build that case and coordinate it in such a way as it maximizes the benefit and recovery to the client. But it's the same thing in the sense that it's a dangerous condition that was not obvious to the plaintiff, to the client, to the injured person, but that the entity, the business, the site, the person in control of the site should have known about and should have prevented and made safe, but didn't. And so this thing, these kinds of types of cases are common in industrial type accidents, industrial type circumstances as well. Yeah. And so the damages there can be huge in those kind of cases, because usually an industrial accident, somebody's really hurt, you know, and it's been an explosion or things like that. So we have an exceptional case division that will also work on some of these really large industrial type, massive, sort of catastrophic cases, and we do that day in and day out. So there's different, different types of slip and fall, different types of premises cases. But either way, they're difficult to win, and you got to have an experienced team that knows what they're doing. So some of these cases are a person might slip and break their elbow and in a grocery store, and some of these cases might go all the way to the extent of.

Woman is working for a company in an unsafe environment where it's not made safe by a GC and falls, or there's an explosion, or there's an accident involved in a forklift, in which case someone is permanently, physically injured. And each of these cases, all these cases together, are collectively referred to as premises liability cases, and that's important to have have the right people in place to do that. Yeah, and you know, so our goal is to help people recover physically, financially, emotionally. So it doesn't matter whether it's a slip and fall in a grocery store or someone steps in a hole at a construction site, or someone has a catastrophic injury in a factory explosion, all of those people are important. All of those people have had, you know, injuries that change, change the way they're living.

And so for us, it's about getting to know them. These cases become personal to us. You know, we want to fight for them and make sure that we're understanding who they are, so we can tell their story. And then by doing that, we can put them, put each of these people in the best possible position to to maximize their recovery, and so that they can, at the end of this process, look back and say, Hey, I couldn't necessarily control what happened to me, but I can't control my response. And I hired professionals that know what they're doing, and they helped me and my family come out of this under the in the best possible way. Thanks for joining us. Don't forget to subscribe and follow us to stay up to date with our weekly episodes. We'll see you next time bye.

I'm Clark, speaks the catastrophic injury lawyer. Welcome to the verdict. This is anatomy of a personal injury case. Jeff, we talk about slip and fall cases. Slip and fall cases are those cases where a person is injured on the premises of another person or a business or whatever. What are the things that are necessary in order to be able to have a successful slip and fall case. Slip and fall cases are very difficult in North Carolina, because you have to prove a lot of different things. You have to prove that the condition that someone's slipped on or got hurt on wasn't something they should have seen and avoided, wasn't obvious. You also have to point out at the same time that it's obvious enough for the business where this happened that they should have known about it, right? So that's a little tricky, right? It's not so obvious that I can see it, but it's obvious enough that they should have seen it and should have done something about it, but didn't, right, and that they had a reasonable opportunity to fix it, right? If I'm walking through the grocery store and a child spills water right in front of me, and it's a lot of water, and they should see that a lot of water, but I'm coming around the corner 10 seconds later, the store hasn't had an opportunity to fix that's not a reasonable opportunity to fix that. So there's a lot of different elements in there that we have to prove to make these cases stand. So it has to be a hidden danger to me, but something that the business knew or should have known about and had a reasonable opportunity to fix it. Okay. And then, and then also, one of the things that's different about it, about these kinds of cases, is the idea that in a car car accident, there's a police report, and the police officer will do an investigation and will assign this person was responsible and this person was not responsible. That's not the case in these in these premises liability slip and fall type cases, is it? Now, because there's no police coming out to investigate, the only investigation that's done is by the premises where you got hurt, and sometimes they don't even do an investigation, and usually the video of the accident they have, and they won't give to us. So we can get that later if we have to file a lawsuit, but we can't get it up front well, and one of the things we have to do is to immediately send out what's called a spoliation letter under those circumstances to make sure that they don't destroy that evidence so that we can access that evidence later, and then we can have other ways to preserve evidence that will be very important later. What about in terms of damages? What are the types of damages that are recoverable in these sort of slip and fall premises liability type cases? Well, there's sort of two subsets to this kind of case. There's the sort of standard slip and fall, or I stepped in some kind of a whole kind of a situation, you know, something that I couldn't see. In those cases, you're looking at medical bills, economic losses, pain and suffering, different things like that. There's another subset, which is sort, we sort of call premises liability, and that may be more of a industrial accident, you know, I'm working for my employer at somebody else's factory, and a forklift,

you know, runs over me and takes, you know, hurts and damages my legs permanently. That's not really a slip and fall, but it is a premises liability case, and maybe a lot more serious case at that point, and there could be a workers compensation piece to that as well. We have workers compensation team that's fantastic that will work with our liability teams to work together on those test cases. It's important that those two entities work hand in hand, to build that case and coordinate it in such a way as it maximizes the benefit and recovery to the client. But it's the same thing in the sense that it's a dangerous condition that was not obvious to the plaintiff, to the client, to the injured person, but that the entity, the business, the site, the person in control of the site should have known about and should have prevented and made safe, but didn't. And so this thing, these kinds of types of cases are common in industrial type accidents, industrial type circumstances as well. Yeah. And so the damages there can be huge in those kind of cases, because usually an industrial accident, somebody's really hurt, you know, and it's been an explosion or things like that. So we have an exceptional case division that will also work on some of these really large industrial type, massive, sort of catastrophic cases, and we do that day in and day out. So there's different, different types of slip and fall, different types of premises cases. But either way, they're difficult to win, and you got to have an experienced team that knows what they're doing. So some of these cases are a person might slip and break their elbow and in a grocery store, and some of these cases might go all the way to the extent of.

Woman is working for a company in an unsafe environment where it's not made safe by a GC and falls, or there's an explosion, or there's an accident involved in a forklift, in which case someone is permanently, physically injured. And each of these cases, all these cases together, are collectively referred to as premises liability cases, and that's important to have have the right people in place to do that. Yeah, and you know, so our goal is to help people recover physically, financially, emotionally. So it doesn't matter whether it's a slip and fall in a grocery store or someone steps in a hole at a construction site, or someone has a catastrophic injury in a factory explosion, all of those people are important. All of those people have had, you know, injuries that change, change the way they're living.

And so for us, it's about getting to know them. These cases become personal to us. You know, we want to fight for them and make sure that we're understanding who they are, so we can tell their story. And then by doing that, we can put them, put each of these people in the best possible position to to maximize their recovery, and so that they can, at the end of this process, look back and say, Hey, I couldn't necessarily control what happened to me, but I can't control my response. And I hired professionals that know what they're doing, and they helped me and my family come out of this under the in the best possible way. Thanks for joining us. Don't forget to subscribe and follow us to stay up to date with our weekly episodes. We'll see you next time bye.