Slip and Fall Attorney in Daytona Beach

During the free case evaluation, the attorney representing you from Morgan and Morgan reviews the evidence and formal incident report to determine the cause of your injuries. After 30 years of handling personal injury cases, we have come up with the three most common causes of slip and fall incidents.

Slick Surface

Public accessible venues owe you a duty of care to prevent you from slipping and falling, which means the operators of the venues must take steps to prevent the development of slick surfaces. From soda leaking from a convenience store beverage machine to an overflowing toilet at a Daytona Beach entertainment venue, a slick surface can cause you to slip and fall. Not only must a venue prevent slick surfaces from developing, but they also assume the responsibility to alert visitors every time a surface becomes dangerous, whether it is spilled liquid indoors or a frozen patch of precipitation outdoors.

Objects

Objects, especially ones that are difficult to notice, cause trip and fall incidents. One of the most common types of trip and fall incidents concerns loose flooring. For example, a section of bunched-up carpet or a rug causes someone to trip and fall hard to the floor. Another object that poses a considerable risk is an electrical cord that runs across a public venue’s floor. Electrical cords represent a common problem inside businesses that need extension cords to provide electricity for displays, as well as airports where extension cords connect to different power supplies. Public venues can take steps to prevent trips and falls by warning visitors about the presence of an object.

Lack of Training

During new employee orientation, most businesses devote a segment of the meeting to explaining the company policies regarding safety issues. However, far too many businesses either skip the safety segment or cut it short by watering down the content. Another problem with business safety training is treating the orientation segment of safety as a one-and-done topic. Public venues need to remind their employees during shift meetings about how to prevent safety hazards from developing, as well as know how to take quick action to reduce the risk posed by a newly developed safety hazard.

The timing of a response after a slip and fall incident determines the likelihood of you getting an insurance claim approved and/or a favorable legal judgment issued by a civil court judge. You should act with a sense of urgency by completing each of the following steps in sequential order.

Get Treatment for Your Injuries

The first step on how to respond to the aftermath of a slip and fall incident involves getting medical care. This is especially true if you sustained a serious injury, such as head trauma and/or spinal cord damage. If you delay getting treated for the injuries sustained as the result of a slip and fall incident, the insurance company processing your claim, as well as the other party’s attorney, might claim you did not sustain injuries that warranted receiving prompt medical care. Even if you feel healthy enough to remain at the scene of the slip and fall incident, you must eventually visit with a healthcare provider to document your injury or injuries.

Inform Management

When you get involved in a car accident, calling a local law enforcement agency to respond leads to the creation of a formal police report that slip and fall lawyers in Daytona Beach, Florida use to determine the cause and whether negligence played a role in producing your injuries. For a slip and fall insurance claim and a civil lawsuit that seeks monetary damages, one or more members of the venue’s management team must complete a formal incident report for your attorney to refer to during the investigation. The incident report should identify the evidence collected, as well as include the contact information of every witness.

Meet With a Personal Injury Attorney From Morgan and Morgan

Before you let your insurance company know about the slip and fall incident, you should first schedule a free case evaluation with one of the slip and fall lawyers in Daytona Beach from Morgan and Morgan. Insurance companies tend to prey on the lack of knowledge possessed by policyholders by denying valid claims or approving claims for values that fall considerably below what policyholders deserve. Meeting with a Morgan and Morgan attorney also helps you decide whether you have enough physical evidence to prove another party committed one or more acts of negligence.

Not every slip and fall case involves the commission of one or more acts of negligence committed by just one party. In fact, many slip and fall lawsuits involve negligence committed by two or more parties. To account for multiple parties that commit at least one act of negligence, Florida follows the comparative negligence principle for assigning fault.

Let’s assume you slipped and fell in the restroom of a restaurant. A slick surface caused you to fall, which appears to point the entire blame for causing the slip and fall incident on the restaurant. Before you entered the restroom, one of the servers stood by the door to warn customers about the safety hazard inside the restroom. However, the server left the area to tend to other duties and did not leave behind a “wet floor” sign to warn customers about the slick surface. Although there was no warning sign and prompt action taken to dry mop the slick surface, you still received notice about the potential safety hazard located in the restroom.

Because of your disregard for the warning issued by the server, the judge hearing your civil lawsuit determines you should accept 25 percent of the blame for causing your injuries. If the judge awards you compensation valued at $20,000, the new value of your monetary damages falls to $15,000 to account for 25 percent of the blame assigned to you.

Perhaps the saying, “Timing is everything” has the most meaning when the time comes to file a civil lawsuit that seeks monetary damages. You have a limited amount of time to take legal action. Each state has established a statute of limitations for filing a personal injury lawsuit, with most states setting a deadline between two and four years. Florida grants plaintiffs two years to file a civil lawsuit that seeks monetary damages, with the clock starting to tick for a case on the day of the slip and fall incident. You might get an extension approved to file a personal injury lawsuit if you developed delayed symptoms from one or more injuries.

Although two years may seem like plenty of time to take legal action, the meaning of the phrase “timing is everything” changes to taking legal action as quickly as possible after a slip and fall incident. Your personal injury attorney from Morgan and Morgan wants to interview witnesses as close to the date of the incident as possible. You should want to act with a sense of urgency to receive compensation to pay off your medical bills. Healthcare providers do not set up payment arrangements that take a percentage of money out of approved insurance claims and favorable legal judgments.

Get on the right side of the timing required for an insurance claim and personal injury lawsuit by scheduling a free case evaluation today with one of the slip and fall lawyers in Daytona Beach at Morgan and Morgan.