Although some people may use the two practice areas interchangeably, there actually is a difference between premises liability and slip and fall. More specifically, slip and fall injuries are a type of premises liability injury.

A premises liability injury is one that’s suffered due to unsafe conditions on someone else’s property. Those conditions can be dangerous chemicals or building materials (like asbestos or lead paint), tripping hazards, faulty wiring or countless other potential hazards. Some of those hazards may result in people slipping and falling.

Slip and fall cases are fairly common everywhere, but they’re especially common further north where people regularly contend with ice in parking lots, walkways and stairs at businesses. People in Florida may still encounter slip and fall hazards in stores due to spills that haven’t been properly cleaned up.

It depends on the situation. If someone has a “Beware Dog – Do Not Enter” sign on their back gate, and you decide to trespass into their backyard anyways, yes, the property owner likely cannot be held liable for the injuries you suffer from the dog attacking you. Not only will this be considered provocation, but you also ignored an explicit warning sign.

The situation is different if the sign isn’t clearly posted, it’s obscured by vegetation or its fallen over. A “Caution: Wet Floor” sign can help protect a grocery store from slip and fall claims if it’s clearly set up in an aisle with a spill, but they might not be as protected if the sign fell over or isn’t clearly visible.

Personal responsibility is a common defense in premises liability cases. You are required to display a certain degree of caution when you are out in public on other people’s property. If you fall down a flight of stairs because you were staring at your phone, not because of any defect in the stairs, you likely can’t file a successful injury claim.

However, in many cases, there’s more than one cause for an injury. You can share some responsibility with the property owner and still be entitled to compensation due to Florida’s pure comparative fault statutes.

Most states use modified comparative fault, which means you can’t collect damages if you’re more than half at fault for your own injuries. In a pure comparative fault state, you can be mostly at fault and still recover damages, but what you’re awarded will be reduced by a percentage equal to your culpability. If you’re 70 percent at fault, you’ll only receive 30 percent of the damages.  

Negligent security is an important category of premises liability law. Property owners have a responsibility to discourage criminal activity on their property. If they fail to do so and people suffer injuries from assaults or robberies, the property owner may be held liable. Broken security gates or fences, broken lights or a lack of security in a dangerous neighborhood may constitute negligent security and open the property owner up to liability for injuries caused by criminal activity, even if the property owner had nothing to do with the attack.

This is vitally important for victims of crimes. Even when perpetrators can be found, victims often can’t collect adequate damages in a civil lawsuit to compensate them for the significant financial costs they’ve been forced to endure. Property owners have commercial liability policies that can cover those costs.

It depends on the age of the hazard and whether it would be considered reasonable for them to have known about it. A grocery store likely can’t be held liable if you or another customer creates a spill and then you immediately slip in it. It’s unreasonable to expect the business to identify and clean up the spill in the split second it took you to slip in the puddle.

Disputes often arise over how old the hazard was, how obvious it was and whether a reasonable property owner should have identified it and either put up a warning sign or fixed it prior to your injury.

Working with an experienced premises liability attorney may help you understand your options and rights as the injury victim.