Los Angeles
Slip & Fall Lawyer

What you must prove

Property owners and businesses in California must use reasonable care to keep their premises safe and to inspect them for hazards. To hold one responsible for a fall, you generally have to show four things:

1. The defendant owned, leased, occupied, or controlled the property. In a shopping center this can be the store, the landlord, or a maintenance contractor, and sometimes all three.
2. A dangerous condition existed. A wet floor, a broken step, a raised section of pavement, missing lighting, an unmarked drop, a loose mat.
3. The defendant knew or should have known about it, and failed to repair it, guard against it, or warn about it within a reasonable time.
4. The condition caused your injury.

The third element is where nearly every fall case is fought.

Notice: the whole fight

A store is not automatically responsible because there was liquid on the floor. It is responsible if an employee caused the spill, if an employee saw it and did nothing, or if it was there long enough that a reasonable inspection would have found it. That last category, called constructive notice, is where the evidence matters.

Under California law, a business that has no reasonable inspection routine, or cannot show when the area was last checked, can be found to have constructive notice precisely because it was not looking. That is why sweep logs, inspection schedules, and the gap between the last recorded check and your fall are central. A business that inspected the aisle eight minutes before you fell has a defense. A business with no record of inspecting it all day does not.

Evidence that disappears

• Surveillance video. Most retail, grocery, and apartment common areas are on camera. Systems overwrite on a loop, sometimes within days. A written preservation demand must reach the owner before that happens.
• Sweep and inspection logs. Show whether and when the area was checked.
• The incident report. If you reported the fall, the business wrote one. Ask for a copy at the time; you will not always get it later.
• Photographs of the hazard, taken before it is cleaned up or fixed. If you could not take them, someone with you may have. The shoes you were wearing are also evidence; keep them.
• Witnesses, including other customers and the employees who responded.
• Prior complaints and prior falls at the same location, which prove the owner knew.

Where falls happen, and who is responsible

Grocery and retail stores

Spills, produce on the floor, freshly mopped areas without signs, merchandise in aisles, loose mats at entrances.

Restaurants and bars

Wet floors, poorly lit steps, uneven patio surfaces.

Apartment buildings

Broken stairs and railings, dim stairwells, leaks, and cracked walkways. Landlords are responsible for common areas and for hazards they know about inside units.

Parking lots and garages

Potholes, wheel stops, unmarked curbs, and oil. Usually the landlord's responsibility rather than the store's.

Public sidewalks and property

Raised sidewalk slabs and broken curbs. Claims against a city or county have a six-month deadline and a "trivial defect" defense for very small height differences.

Hotels, gyms, and pools

Wet deck surfaces, locker rooms, and equipment areas.

Identifying the right defendant matters because each may have its own policy, and because the lease between a store and its landlord often decides who is responsible for the parking lot or the entrance. I read those leases.

If you were partly careless

Expect the defense to argue that you were looking at your phone, wearing the wrong shoes, walking too fast, or that the hazard was so obvious you should have avoided it. California uses pure comparative fault, so those arguments reduce your recovery by your percentage of responsibility rather than barring it. Some of them are answered by the video, which is another reason to preserve it: the defense's version of how you were walking rarely survives the footage.

What a claim may include

Medical

Emergency care, imaging, surgery for fractures, physical therapy, and future care. Falls commonly produce wrist, hip, knee, shoulder, and back injuries, and head injuries when the fall is backward.

Lost income

Wages missed and reduced earning capacity.

Pain and suffering

Physical pain and the loss of activities and independence, which for older clients can be significant.

Household services

Help you need with tasks you can no longer do yourself during recovery.

Deadlines

Private property

Two years from the date of the fall.

Public sidewalk, park, building, or other government property

Six months to file a written government claim before any lawsuit.

Video

No legal deadline, but it is often gone within thirty days, and sometimes within a week.

How I handle a fall case

I am honest with fall clients on the first call: these cases are harder than car cases, the defense will argue the hazard was obvious and you were not looking, and a fall with no video, no incident report, and no witness is difficult. If the case is weak I will say so. If it is strong, the work is preserving the evidence immediately, identifying every party and policy, and building the notice argument from the owner's own records.

• You deal with me directly. I keep the caseload small enough to personally handle every file.
• I build the file for trial even though most cases settle. When a case needs a courtroom, it gets one.
• No attorney fee unless there is a recovery. The fee and case costs are written down before any work begins.

More about my background.

Slip and fall questions

Related practice areas