You’ve suffered serious injuries in a slip-and-fall accident. You don’t believe that it was your fault at all. The hazardous conditions were created by someone else, and you paid the price with a traumatic brain injury, broken bones, spinal cord injuries or other such issues.
But what do you need to do to prove that the other party was negligent? There are a lot of different things to consider as you move forward with your case.
Four main elements
To begin with, remember that there are four main elements to a case like this. First of all, the other party must have a legal duty to keep you safe. Secondly, they must have breached that duty in some way.
For instance, a store owner has a legal duty to create a safe place for customers. If they did not do this, that breaches this duty by subjecting those customers to risks that they didn’t expect to face.
Next, you have to show causation, which means that the action or interaction of the other party led to the injuries. An example of this could be if the store owner neglected to fix a leaking pipe, meaning that the tile floor was always too slick to be walked upon safely.
Keep in mind that there are situations in which you can prove that someone should have known about a hazardous condition, even if they claim that they didn’t. If the pipe just started leaking that day, the store owner may be able to say that they had no idea there was a risk. But if they’ve been ignoring it for a month, they either knew that it was there and they did nothing or they should have known about it if they were taking proper steps to make sure that the space was safe.
Seeking damages
The final thing that has to be shown in a case like this is that they were realistic financial damages. You suffered actual harm in the fall, you had to pay for medical care and you lost wages when you couldn’t work. These are examples of potential damages, and you need to know what legal steps to take if you’d like to seek financial compensation.