Whenever you leave the house, you go through a kind of safety checklist. You make sure the doors and windows are locked, and you didn’t leave anything on the stove. Once you get in the car, you put on your seat belt and check your mirrors before pulling out. These safety precautions become routine, and it’s all about controlling your environment.
What happens when you go into someone else’s environment? Can you trust that the business you’re visiting has created a safe environment?
Any time you go to a business or even a friend’s home, you expect the owner of those properties to provide a reasonable level of safety. That is actually the law. When an owner fails in those obligations, they should be held accountable for any injury that results from their negligence.
If you’re involved in this type of situation, you owe it to yourself to talk with an experienced Midland premises liability attorney. Your attorney can help determine whether you have a legitimate claim against the property owner.
If you do, you’re entitled to seek full compensation.
Defining a Dangerous Property Condition Under Premises Liability Law
You never want to get into a situation where you become obsessed over all the potential dangers that might be lurking outside your home. That doesn’t mean you should take the opposite approach and ignore those hazards. To stay safe, you need to strike a balance.
These are the dangerous conditions you should watch out for:
- Walking Surface Hazards: Spilled liquids, slick walkways, or torn carpets on high-traffic floors can all cause you to trip and fall. A responsible property owner will post warning signs and move swiftly to clean up or repair the dangerous condition.
- Structural Flaws: Broken stairs, missing handrails, or collapsing balcony components are all examples of structural flaws that can lead to serious injuries. These are hazards an owner should catch if they inspect the property regularly.
- Environmental Risks: Inadequate lighting in dark parking lots can create an atmosphere for crime. It can also trigger accidents if you can’t see where stairs end. Other environmental risks include toxic exposure to mold, lead paint, or asbestos. Those are things a property owner should not only inspect for but also move swiftly to mitigate. These might not cause injuries overnight, but they would still be considered a premises liability issue.
- Security Failures: Broken locks, missing gates, and a lack of surveillance cameras or guards can lead to foreseeable criminal assault. This is another area where it is reasonable to assume the property owner should be aware of it and take proactive measures to rectify it.
Common Defenses Property Owners Raise
Even though a property owner will have liability insurance, they know that if they have to pay on a claim, those insurance rates are more than likely to rise. That is why they’re going to put up a rigorous defense against claims that they were negligent.
These are some common examples of an owner’s defense against a premises liability claim:
Lack of Notice
The owner can claim they did not know about the hazard or that it hadn’t been there long enough for them to discover it. This is common with spill accidents.
Someone could know a bottle of sauce falls off the grocery shelf, and in the next few seconds, you happen to walk down that aisle, slip on the sauce, and hurt yourself. If the staff did not have a reasonable amount of time to address the issue, they might not be held responsible for your injuries.
On the other hand, staff should be trained to respond quickly to any spill and constantly monitor aisles where spills can happen.
Open and Obvious Danger
An open and obvious danger could be a massive crack in the pavement or a wet floor. Both could be considered clear enough that a reasonable person should have seen and avoided it. An owner could also argue that you weren’t paying attention to your surroundings because you were talking on the phone while walking.
Modified Comparative Fault
Texas follows a modified comparative fault rule. That allows the victim to be held partially accountable for the accident. If the owner is successful in arguing that your careless actions caused or contributed to the accident, they could get your compensation reduced by whatever percentage of blame was assigned to you.
If you are found more than 50 percent responsible, you receive nothing.
Lack of Duty Owed
Texas doesn’t owe every visitor the same protection, and which category you land in can decide the case before anyone argues about the hazard itself.
Invitees get the most. If you were shopping, dining, or otherwise there for the owner’s business, the owner had to protect you from hazards it knew about and hazards a reasonable inspection would have caught.
Licensees get noticeably less. A social guest at a private home sits in this category, and the owner only has to warn about dangers it actually knows about. No duty to go looking. If your friend genuinely didn’t know the porch step was rotting, that’s a much harder claim.
Trespassers get the least, though not nothing. A Texas property owner still can’t injure a trespasser willfully, wantonly, or through gross negligence, and the attractive nuisance doctrine raises that floor when the trespasser is a child.
Where you were standing matters too. An invitee who wanders into an employee-only area can step outside the scope of the invitation and lose invitee protection along with it.
Expect the defense to argue for the lowest category it can sell.
Compliance and Fulfilled Duty
An owner can also argue that they were in compliance with all building codes, industry standards, and routine maintenance. There might also be a situation where you knowingly engaged in a risky activity that led to the injury.
For example, if you go to a honky-tonk and ride a mechanical bull, you’re accepting the risk that you’ll be thrown off.
Barrera Law Group Knows Where to Look
Having an experienced premises liability attorney on your side can fortify your claim against the owner’s assertions. The attorneys at Barrera Law Group LLC have helped many Midland residents pursue a justified premises liability claim.
We have a deep understanding of all the applicable rules and regulations for businesses. We also know where to look to find evidence that can lead to a successful outcome.
If you’ve been injured on someone else’s property, don’t assume it was all your fault.
Call our office to set up a free consultation. Let’s talk about what happened and decide if you have a case. You’ll feel a lot better getting the right answers.