Property Owner Wasn’t Aware of The Hazard

Answer:

If the landlord or the person that owns the property or the grocery store doesn’t know about something on the floor, for instance, can they be sued? The answer to that question is, yes, they can be sued, depending on the circumstances. For instance, let’s say you’re in a grocery store and a grape is on the floor; somebody comes along, slips on the grape and is seriously injured as a result of that. Grapes are one of those things that cause a lot of injuries in grocery stores.

The answer to the question is, well, maybe they didn’t know – maybe the grocery store didn’t know – but the question is why didn’t they know? Did they have a responsibility to do what’s called a sweep of the store, where people go through the store and look at the floors periodically (every 15 minutes, every 10 minutes) to make sure that there aren’t things like grapes on the floor? Did they do that? Did they document that they did that on a regular basis? If they’re not doing that on a regular basis, then they don’t know how long that grape was there. It could’ve been there a long time before somebody discovered it, and somebody fell on it as a result. All of that needs to be taken into account, and every case is different. We have to look at the circumstances of the case.

You can also have situations in which there’s a bad design or there’s a failure to guard against the danger, or there’s a failure to warn against the danger that designed into the premises. Those things can also be a factor in determining whether or not there’s a premises case. The defense often is, “We didn’t know about it,” but sometimes the question is, shouldn’t they have known about it or shouldn’t they have designed out the danger? Those things can be taken into account in every premises case and need to be considered. If you have questions in regard to a premises liability case, let us know.