Coral Springs Slip and Fall Accidents

The city of Coral Springs has plenty to experience and enjoy. As a carefully planned community located near the Everglades in Broward County, Coral Springs offers plenty of shopping, dining, and recreational opportunities to visitors, along with a standard of living for locals that has landed the city on many lists of America’s best cities, safest places to live, and so on. Of course, not everyone takes issues such as safety and carefulness seriously, and incidents such as slip and fall accidents are not uncommon. The Coral Springs slip and fall lawyers at Cohn & Smith, P.A., are very familiar with these types of cases. Our premises liability attorneys have handled a wide variety of cases in South Florida over the years.

Under Florida’s negligence and personal injury laws, entities that own shops, grocery stores, restaurants, malls, hotels, night clubs, and other places of business may be held liable when a customer is injured on the premises due to the owner or operator’s negligence. The burden of proving liability rests on the injured person, or the plaintiff, who must make out a case of negligence against the defendant, as the business owner is known. This is a four-step process that requires proof by a preponderance of the evidence of four separate elements: duty, breach of duty, causation, and damages.

The duty element of a slip and fall case refers to a business owner’s general obligation to keep the premises in a reasonably safe condition so that people who come into the business will not be harmed. The determination of whether this duty was breached is usually a question for the jury. Typical issues in a slip and fall case include wet or slippery floors, obstacles in the plaintiff’s path, poor lighting, changes in elevation, hidden hazards (such as a pothole in a parking lot), or faulty stairs.

A plaintiff’s damages may include the costs of medical treatment (doctor and hospital bills, physical therapy costs, prescription medications, etc.), replacement of lost earnings while the plaintiff was off from work recuperating from the accident, and compensation for pain and suffering. In order to be compensated for these damages, the plaintiff must convince the jury with the assistance of a slip and fall attorney in Coral Springs that they were hurt as a proximate result of the defendant’s breach of duty. “Proximate cause” requires the plaintiff to prove that their injury was foreseeable, given the defendant’s breach of duty. For instance, a jury would likely determine that it was foreseeable that someone could fall on a wet floor that did not have any warning signs.

The plaintiff’s own fault may also be taken into consideration in determining whether the defendant is liable for the plaintiff’s damages and, if so, whether the amount of money due to the plaintiff should be reduced by a percentage corresponding to the fault attributable to them. Such “comparative fault” arguments are very common in slip and fall, trip and fall, and other premises liability lawsuits. The defendant may attempt to blame the accident on the plaintiff, claiming that they fell because their shoes had slippery soles, rather than because of a puddle on the floor, or that they fell down the stairs because of their own clumsiness rather than a loose railing. To combat these accusations and minimize the effect of a comparative fault argument, it helps to retain counsel as soon as possible after an accident.

A seasoned injury attorney can help a plaintiff document the cause of an accident, file a formal complaint in court, and get started on seeking to hold the defendant liable for its negligent conduct. To speak to a knowledgeable Coral Springs slip and fall attorney, call Cohn & Smith, P.A., today at 954-431-8100 or contact us online. We offer a free consultation and do not get paid unless we get money for you.