Claiming Compensation for Slip and Fall Accidents

Introduction

Slipping and falling in your local shopping centre may seem like a minor incident but it can have serious long-term consequences. Such accidents can not only adversely affect your health, but also your capacity to work and your lifestyle. An injury caused by a ‘slip and fall’ accident can leave you not only physically harmed, but also financially crippled with burdensome medical bills and a reduced earning capacity for years to come. If this injury is caused by the negligence of another, the law entitles you to compensation for your injuries and loss. This article seeks to provide an introduction to the steps you should take when you have suffered a serious injury of this nature in a public place and guide you through the nature of the legal and evidentiary issues with which you and your lawyer will need to deal.

What does your lawyer need to know?

To build your case for compensation your lawyer will require you to provide them with details of your accident. Your lawyer will need to build a picture of the accident to enable them to determine the likelihood of you receiving compensation. As well as the nature of your injuries your lawyer will ask the following questions:

- Where, when and in what circumstances did the accident occur?

This will simply be the time and place of the accident as well as the nature of your presence at the site of the incident. For example, the accident may have occurred in the fresh food section of a supermarket when you were grocery shopping.

- What caused the accident?

The cause of the accident may have been a slippery substance on the floor. For example, the substance that made the floor slippery may have been a detergent spill that had not yet been cleared up. Your claim has more chance of succeeding if you can ascertain its source and how long the hazard had been ignored by the owners.

It may be difficult to remember the incident, and falling in a public place can be embarrassing, however the answers to these questions will present the basis of your claim for compensation so it is important to recall the incident accurately. Courts will make decisions based on limited evidence so it is important that the information you give your lawyer is as full and accurate as possible.

What will your lawyer do to prepare your claim?

After providing your lawyer with details about the incident they will then gather further evidence to build a case that the owners of the premises where you slipped had acted negligently. This may involve:

• Gaining statements from witnesses;
• Surveying the accident area;
• Reviewing the hazard reduction/inspection policies of the occupiers; and
• Commissioning a report from a safety expert on the accident area.

This evidence will enable your lawyer to show whether the accident you suffered was foreseeable, and whether the defendants acted in a reasonable manner to reduce the hazard that caused the accident. In other words, this evidence will be needed to show that there was a clear danger of a ‘slip and fall’ accident in a particular area that was not reasonably dealt with by the defendants.

How will a court determine your claim?

The outcome of your claim will hinge on legal as well as evidentiary issues. The law states that occupiers (such as shop owners) have a duty to exercise reasonable care to avoid foreseeable injury to all entrants onto their premises. What will be ‘reasonable’ will be determined by the circumstances of your individual case.

The law recognises that certain places will present different hazards than others. In some places (such as the fresh food section in a supermarket) the law will use a different standard as to what constitutes ‘reasonable’ action compared to other areas where hazards are rare. A court will therefore determine:

• The standard of hazard response;
• The magnitude of the risk; and
• The expense of the defendant in reducing that hazard.

For example, in Kelly v Lend Lease Retail [1993] a 60-year-old woman slipped and fell on woodchips that had scattered from nearby pots in a shopping mall. The court determined that the owners were negligent in that they had ignored the foreseeable hazard that woodchips would present. The judge, Higgins J, held that reasonable behaviour in dealing with this risk would constitute a system of floor inspection and cleaning. Similarly, in Shoeys v Allan [1991] the court held that a reasonable response to hazards in a fresh food department would be for the defendant store to direct an employee to inspect the department for risks at least every 30 minutes.

It must also be noted that the court will need to find that you exercised ordinary care for your own safety. If the defendant can show that your own risky behaviour contributed to the accident then you will not be successful. In Morgan v Sherton (1999) a plaintiff who jumped over a wall and sustained an injury was held to have acted in an unforeseeable manner and was therefore unable to successfully claim for compensation.

Conclusion

If you have been injured in an accident like this in a public place you may be entitled to receive compensation. If you believe you have a case for compensation contact a personal injuries legal specialist, such as Gerard Malouf & Partners, today. Your claim will not only assist you but may also help to remove hazards that could injure others in the future.

Read information about our public liability slip fall accident claims services.

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At Gerard Malouf & Partners we offer a service of the first consultation free to ascertain details of your claim & explain our services that only require payment if the action we undertake on your behalf is successful.