Premises Liability Happens In Florida Homes & Commercial Properties
Corbin Sutter
Premises Liability
People living and working in Fort Meyers and Englewood are always protected by a legal concept known as premises liability. This means that whether you are visiting someone’s home, going to some place for work, or even visiting a restaurant, shopping mall, grocery store, or auto repair garage, whoever owns that property has a basic responsibility to take reasonable precautions to ensure the safety of visitors.When property owners see a risk that could injure visitors and choose to ignore it, that is considered premises liability, and any injury sustained as a result of ignoring that risk is both the legal and financial fault of the property owner. Here are the most common causes of premises liability in Florida.
Parking Lot Injuries
Various injuries can occur in parking lots, such as slipping and falling due to poor maintenance of the surfaces or even assault and robbery due to crime. In either case, if someone parks a car in a parking lot and is injured due to known—but ignored—criminal activity or known but neglected uneven walking surfaces, then the parking lot owner is responsible.
Under ordinary circumstances, issues like broken pavement should be repaired, while problems like crime should be dealt with through lights, surveillance cameras, and other known deterrence.
Construction Site Carelessness
Construction sites pose a significant risk of injury to the workers themselves, and unfortunately, this same risk applies even to visitors or those just passing through. Between work tools strewn about various levels of a site, exposed electrical wiring, and heavy vehicles on the move, it’s very easy to have an accident here, which is why extreme precautions must be taken to protect the general public who may be walking past while all this is happening.
Unfortunately, extreme carelessness can undo even the most aggressive precautions. Horseplay, such as someone juggling tools in the air, only to drop one and have it fall on a member of the public walking down below, can cause serious damage.
Dog Bites
This tends to happen more on the residential side, but it can affect visitors and professionals alike. Florida has a zero-tolerance policy for dog bites, and it doesn’t matter whether an owner is aware or not of a dog’s aggressive behavior; if that dog bites anyone, the legal culpability rests squarely with the owner.
Visitors, such as children that are bitten by an aggressive dog, are the responsibility of the owner. This also extends to visitors professionally, such as postal workers dropping off mail or even couriers or delivery people bringing items ordered from online shopping.
Slipping & Falling
This is, by far, the most common type of premises liability and uniformly happens across residential and commercial properties because there are so many possible variables that can create a slip-and-fall scenario. In private residences, neglecting maintenance, such as allowing cracks in the walkway leading to a home to spread and even make the individual step uneven, can easily cause a slip and fall. Even crooked steps inside a house that have been neglected for repair can cause a slip and fall.
This risk becomes even more pronounced in commercial properties that have a much higher level of foot traffic. A grocery store, for example, may have an accident where a bottle of olive oil is accidentally dropped and breaks, spilling oil all over the floor. Unsurprisingly, this reduces friction and traction in that area, making it very easy to slip and fall. If no one cleans up the mess quickly, the risk to customers of injury is extremely high if management ignores its responsibility and does not deal with the threat of harm.
If you’ve been injured on someone else’s property due to premises liability, talk to a slip-and-fall lawyer about what to do next.