As we go about our daily lives, we encounter numerous obstacles or hazards that we need to navigate to avoid an injury. However, when you visit someone else’s property — whether a public space, private residence, retail store, or government building — you have every right to expect that the owners or caretakers of this property have taken the appropriate measures to ensure that your visit is safe.
When walking around the grocery store or shopping plaza, it is typically not at the top of your mind to look out for slick walkways, broken handrails, missing stair treads, or bunched carpets, in part because property owners are legally responsible for these conditions and addressing them before anyone is hurt. Unfortunately, not all property owners or managers are diligent in their care, meaning that you may suffer an injury after an accident caused by a hazard they are responsible for addressing.
Contact 1-800-Injured For a Free Consultation With a Premises Liability Lawyer
1-800-Injured is an attorney and medical referral service. After a slip and fall accident, your attention is typically focused on trying to get the medical care you need, managing the impacts on your employment, and trying to keep your life on track as you come to terms with your injuries. In many instances, trying to find an attorney gets pushed back or forgotten, and victims file claims on their own — leading to settlements for far less than they deserve.
Instead of adding another responsibility to your list, contact 1-800-Injured to be connected with a Tallahassee premises liability attorney with ease. We will schedule a free consultation for you, where you will be able to speak directly with an experienced legal professional about your situation and learn more about how you can benefit from partnering with a personal injury lawyer. After a personal injury — especially one that leads to high medical bills, ongoing lost wages, and a range of other serious impacts — trying to make sense of what the future may hold can be overwhelming and stressful. This consultation is an excellent opportunity to learn more about what you can expect while working through a claim with professional support.
Contact us as soon as possible to get started today, and read more about slip and fall accidents in Tallahassee below.
What Is a Slip and Fall Accident?
As the name suggests, a slip and fall accident is a personal injury where a victim slips or trips and falls due to a hazardous condition or obstacle on someone else’s property. Property owners and managers are liable for visitor safety, including keeping building structures safe and functional, addressing any dangerous conditions like wet floors, bunched-up carpeting, dangerous stairways, lighting issues, and more. Even if a property owner was not aware of the hazard, ignorance is typically not a sufficient excuse for the situation.
Liability For Slip and Fall Damages
When visitors are injured due to a hazardous condition, they may be entitled to compensation through the responsible party’s liability insurance, typically the business, homeowner’s, or property insurance. A premises liability claim seeks compensatory damages for a number of different impacts, both financial and non-financial in nature.
For a victim to seek this compensation, they must prove that the property owner either did know or should have known about the dangerous condition and therefore should have either fixed the issue or properly warned visitors. Failure to do so is negligence on behalf of the property owner, and they are liable for the resulting damages.
Seeking Compensation For a Slip and Fall Accident in Tallahassee
Once fault has been established after a slip and fall accident, the next step is to calculate the damages a victim has suffered (or will suffer in the future). Some of these damages are straightforward, such as the cost of medical care up to the date of the claim, but these impacts only tell a small part of the story. Insurance companies will try to pay a settlement based on these obvious impacts while avoiding a wide range of additional damages that personal injury victims are entitled to.
Compensatory damages are divided into two distinct sub-categories known as economic and non-economic damages. While equally important, these two distinct types of damages require many different approaches in order to reach clear calculations for the amount a victim is owed.
Economic Damages
Economic damages apply to any impact that has a measurable dollar value associated with it, such as a medical bill, lost wages, sick leave, or long-term disability, as well as the cost of various services a victim may require to accommodate their injuries. These are just a few of the many impacts that an experienced and detail-oriented personal injury attorney will identify and calculate while determining the total amount their client is rightfully entitled to after an accident.
Typically, a victim’s insurance company is the first to be repaid for these damages for any medical care. Economic damages are calculated and compensated on a 1:1 basis, meaning that there is no multiplier or additional payments beyond the actual value of these costs or losses; however, non-economic damages are commonly calculated based on the total amount of economic damages, meaning that each dollar omitted from these calculations may translate to anywhere between 1.5-5x that value omitted from your non-economic damage calculations. Therefore, it is imperative that every economic impact is included.
Non-Economic Damages
Non-economic damages seek compensation for impacts that do not have set market values and are typically highly subjective. These damages include things like the actual pain and suffering that a victim endures following a slip and fall accident, as well as the emotional impacts that this traumatic experience may have. Things like depression, anxiety, loss of enjoyment, and inconvenience are all valid non-economic damages that must be examined and considered during this step of damage calculations.
The dollar value of these damages may be calculated by a number of methods, including a multiplier — where the severity of the overall non-economic impacts are quantified on a scale from 1.5-5 and then multiplied against the economic damages — or a per diem calculation that establishes a daily cost and then multiplies it by the days a victim has suffered. Your attorney will choose the most appropriate calculation method for your situation to get you the money you are rightfully owed.