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Video Summary
Experienced lawyers from the Speaks Law Firm explains the complexities of premises liability and slip and fall cases in North Carolina. Proving negligence is difficult because the victim must demonstrate that a hazard was hidden from them yet foreseeable to the property owner, who failed to address it within a reasonable timeframe. Unlike vehicle accidents, these incidents lack official police reports, requiring attorneys to secure evidence like surveillance footage through specialized legal letters. While slip and fall injuries typically involve medical expenses and pain and suffering, broader liability cases can include industrial accidents or catastrophic events. The firm emphasizes that their goal is to provide legal advocacy and financial recovery for individuals whose lives have been altered by dangerous property conditions.
Transcription of the Video
Jeff: We talk about slip and fall cases. Slip and fall cases are those cases where a person is injured on the premises of another person or a business or whatever. What are the things that are necessary in order to be able to have a successful slip and fall case?
Speaker 2: Slip and fall cases are very difficult in North Carolina because you have to prove many different things. You have to prove that the condition that someone slipped on or was injured on wasn’t something they should have seen and avoided; it wasn’t obvious. You also have to point out at the same time that it’s obvious enough for the business where this happened that they should have known about it. So that’s a little tricky: it’s not so obvious that I can see it, but it’s obvious enough that they should have seen it and should have done something about it but didn’t, and that they had a reasonable opportunity to fix it. If I’m walking through the grocery store and a child spills water right in front of me—and it’s a lot of water and they should see that it’s a lot of water—but I’m coming around the corner 10 seconds later, the store hasn’t had an opportunity to fix that. That’s not a reasonable opportunity to fix that. So there’s a lot of different elements in there that we have to prove to make these cases stand. It has to be a hidden danger to me but something that the business knew or should have known about and had a reasonable opportunity to fix it.
One of the things that’s different about these kinds of cases is the idea that in a car accident there’s a police report and the police officer will do an investigation and will assign this person was responsible and this person was not responsible. That’s not the case in these premises liability slip and fall type cases. There’s no police coming out to investigate. The only investigation that’s done is by the premises where you were injured, and sometimes they don’t even do an investigation. Usually the video of the accident they have and they won’t give to us; so we can secure that later if we have to file a lawsuit but we cannot secure it up front. Well, and one of the things we have to do is to immediately send out what’s called a spoliation letter under those circumstances to make sure that they don’t destroy that evidence so that we can access that evidence later.
Jeff: What about in terms of damages? What are the types of damages that are recoverable in these sort of slip and fall premises liability type cases?
Speaker 2: Well there’s sort of two subsets to this kind of case. There’s the sort of standard slip and fall or I stepped in some kind of a hole kind of a situation—something that I couldn’t see. In those cases you’re looking at medical bills, economic losses, pain and suffering, different things like that. There’s another subset which we sort of call premises liability, and that may be more of an industrial accident. You know, I’m working for my employer at somebody else’s factory and a forklift runs over me and hurts me, damages my legs permanently. That’s not really a slip and fall but it is a premises liability case and maybe a much more serious case at that point, and there could be a workers’ compensation piece to that as well. We have a workers’ compensation team that is highly skilled that will work with our liability teams to work together on those types of cases.
Jeff: Jeff, when we’re talking about slip and fall and premises liability, what is the difference between these two concepts?
Speaker 2: All slip and fall cases are premises liability because it’s some type of an injury that’s occurred on somebody else’s premises. Not all premises liability cases are slip and falls. You could have an injury on someone’s premises where you don’t slip and fall—maybe there’s an explosion at a factory or some type of a catastrophic injury where somebody falls off a building. Slip and fall is just one very common type of premises liability case. The idea is it’s a dangerous condition that exists on someone’s property that they should have known about or did know about that’s not immediately apparent or obvious to the injured party. Our goal is to help people recover physically, financially, and emotionally. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a slip and fall in a grocery store or someone steps in a hole at a construction site or someone has a catastrophic injury in a factory explosion; all of those people are important. For us it’s about becoming acquainted with them; these cases become personal to us. We want to fight for them and make sure that we’re understanding who they are so we can tell their story and then by doing that we can put each of these people in the optimal position to maximize their recovery so that at the end of this process they can look back and say they hired professionals that know what they’re doing and they helped their family come out of this in the ideal way.