By: Darrell Castle
You should initially assume your injuries are the fault of the property owner
If you’ve fell and injured yourself on someone else’s property, you should contact an attorney you can trust. You need an attorney who’s going to fight to get you the compensation you’re entitled to. Call (901) 327-1212 to schedule a FREE case evaluation today, or fill out one of the contact forms on this page.
Video Transcript
If I fall down and hurt myself on somebody else’s property, how do I know whose fault it was?
Hi, I’m Darrell Castle and I’m an attorney licensed to practice law in the state of Tennessee and I get that question quite often. And the way you determine whose fault it was is you analyze certain things.
But the best advice I can give to you initially is to assume it was the property owner’s fault because they have a duty to keep the premises safe when they invite people like you to come and do business with them or come into their home or whatever it might be.
But one way to look at it though is whatever you slipped on or fell on (and sometimes the most vulnerable among us are the people who are injured, elderly, young or so forth who are least likely to notice something is left on the floor or some unsafe condition), who put that unsafe condition there? Was it the store owners? The store employees? If so, then he or they are probably definitely liable if he did put it there.
The other question is if it was put there by a customer of the store, then how would the store owner or business owner know that is was there? And the answer to that is that he has to reasonably have time to ascertain that it’s there. In other words, has it been there long enough for him to have conducted safety inspections of his store and place of business? Because he’s responsible for doing that occasionally. He has to inspect for unsafe conditions.
But if you’re walking along in a grocery store and a customer right in front of you – right at that exact moment – drops a banana and you inadvertently slip on that banana and fall and hurt yourself then that might not be the store owner’s fault because he had no chance to prevent that from happening.
It has to be negligence on the part of the business owner, but my advice is to seek very qualified legal advice for that type of thing and not try to figure it out by yourself without the help of an attorney.