You’re shopping at a grocery store when you slip on spilled cooking oil, fall and break your hip. You require surgery, followed by a long, painful recovery. You are out of work for months and your medical bills cost tens of thousands of dollars.
Can you hold the store liable for those damages?
The answer lies in an area of law known as premises liability.
Premises liability explained
Under California law, everyone has a duty to take reasonable care to minimize the risk of harm to other people. This duty applies to property owners, meaning they have a duty to repair or warn of safety hazards on their property if they expect others to visit.
If a property owner breaches this duty by failing to repair a known safety hazard, and a visitor is injured as a result, the owner may be held liable for the injured party’s damages. This legal theory is known as premises liability.
Complicating factors
The above explanation of premises liability may seem straightforward, but the details can become complicated when the legal principles are applied to real-world situations.
One important fact to remember is that a property owner just has to exercise reasonable care in the management of their property. They aren’t necessarily responsible for safety hazards if they couldn’t have known about them. What’s more, they can’t be held liable if a visitor willfully or recklessly hurt themselves. If a safety hazard is open and obvious to anyone paying a reasonable amount of attention to their surroundings, the owner might escape liability if a visitor is injured by it.
The slip and fall
To return to the example of the grocery store accident, let’s say you sue the store to recover compensation for your damages.
One of the first questions the store owners will raise in their defense is whether you were taking reasonable care and watching where you were stepping when you slipped and fell. Of course, it’s reasonable that a grocery shopper might be looking at the shelves instead of at the floor, but if the store management had put warning cones and flags around the spill and an employee was in the process of mopping it up at the time you stepped into the puddle, a court might find your carelessness bars you from recovering anything from the store owner.
Another question that might come up concerns how long the spill was on the floor before the accident occurred. It might not be reasonable to expect the owners to respond to every spill immediately, but they should regularly inspect the store for hazards. If they saw a spill, they should have posted a warning and started cleaning it up as soon as possible.