If you are injured in a slip and fall accident, contacting a personal injury lawyer is one of your options. A personal injury attorney, however, cannot help in all instances. What's important is whether or not the property owner had liability for the premises at which you are injured. If you can establish that the premise owner was negligent in some regard, you may be able to get money from a lawsuit.

A slip and fall accident can easily turn deadly, particularly for individuals who are already infirm. There are ways that you can avoid having one of these mishaps, though the venues where these accidents occur usually have some responsibility in preventing them. Here are some basic tips for keeping safe when you are out and about.

Retail Stores

Retail stores are some of the most dangerous places for slip and fall accidents. They tend to have very hard, tile floors and falling on one of these surfaces can cause serious injuries. If you have problems walking, the danger is even greater.

Watch out around the doorways in retail establishments. If you notice that the floor mats are bunched up, be very careful so that you do not end up tripping over them. You will also want to keep an eye out for wet floors, particularly at times of the year when people tend to be tracking in mud and water. There are plenty of people who injure themselves every year by taking a spill at a retail establishment.

Restaurants

Restaurants can be particularly dangerous for slip and fall injuries. Because restaurants obviously have plenty of liquids being transported back and forth across the floor, there is always the hazard of slipping on a spot of water or other liquid. Restaurants also have a lot of people coming in and out and, because of that, it's difficult to control the condition of the floor at times. If you go to a restaurant, make certain that you watch out for trip hazards.

Did you know that your landlord sometimes may be held responsible if something happens to you on their property? They're not always responsible but, if it can be demonstrated to a jury that some act of negligence on their part led to your being injured, you may be able to successfully sue them for damages.

An Example

A woman in New York recently won a lawsuit against her landlord after she was attacked in her home. The jury found that the landlord was negligent in their upkeep of the property, something that most tenants are likely familiar with, at least to some degree.

In this particular case, the landlord was found to have been negligent because they failed to fix the locks on the woman's doors after having been informed that they were defective several times. Because this allowed her assailant to get into the apartment, it was found to be the fault of the landlord.

Suing for Premise Liability

Most of the time, you can hire a personal injury attorney from a personal injury law firm to handle these cases. They will be able to work with you if you have a case to establish how negligence played a part in any injuries or property damage you suffered and how the landlord was responsible for it.

In some cases, people who are injured on the premises of a commercial establishment may have done better to avoid going into that establishment in the first place. There are some business owners out there that do a very poor job of attending to the safety of their patrons. Here are some warning signs to watch out for when you walk into a store that you haven't been in before, particularly if you have trouble walking or keeping your balance.

Bunched Mats

During wet and snowy conditions, watch out for mats that are bunched up by the entryways. This is a good sign of two things: the mat is obviously one trip hazard and the floor nearby the bunched up the mat is probably wet. The last thing you want to do is take a tumble on the hard tile floor of a retail establishment. If they aren't attending to this most basic of safety precautions for their customers, they're probably not taking care of the more subtle dangers, either.

Wet Floors

It's usually pretty easy to spot a wet floor, but this is not always the case. If you're in an establishment and you notice broken bottles of product or other obvious signs that something has been spilled on the floor and not cleaned up, avoid the area. In some grocery stores and other establishments, very little attention is given to keeping the area safe for customers. These business owners may end up getting sued at some point but, in order for that to happen, somebody has to get injured and it's better if it isn't you.

In some cases, a premise owner may be liable for injuries caused by a security firms they employ to safeguard their premises. They may also be liable if the security proves inadequate and if someone is harmed as a result of their negligence. There are cases where security firms turn out to be far less than professional and where they cause people to come to harm or, in doing their work, they actually harm people through their own negligence.

Just about everyone is familiar with the scenario of someone being injured on a property and suing the property owner. For instance, someone may slip and fall, hurting themselves and then call a personal injury attorney to represent them in court against the property owner. This is a very common type of claim and is one of the ways that injured parties can hold property owners responsible for not maintaining a safe environment. However, there are other ways that property owners can be held liable.

Premise liability lawsuits are usually filed because an injury that could have been avoided ended up costing the victim in medical bills and lost wages. Most often, these individuals hire a personal injury lawyer after having been injured. If their injuries are extensive and if they weren’t doing anything to bring the injury on themselves, they sometimes are awarded a sum by a jury or through a settlement with the business or person that they file the claim against. These lawsuits are typically not frivolous and some of the claimants are severely injured.

Businesses that invite people onto their property carry insurance to cover them in the event of a lawsuit. The reason for this is not that people are sue-happy. It’s simply because, at some level, businesses have to acknowledge that they are responsible for the safety of the people on their property and, someday, they may end up falling short of those responsibilities. Retail stores have to take this into consideration, as does any other business where customers have to come on the premises during the day. Such businesses also have to provide a reasonably safe environment for their visitors.

A lot of the cases a personal injury attorney takes have to do with premise liability. These may involve slip and fall accidents in commercial spaces or other types of disasters that should have been avoided. The crux of these cases is that the person who was injured had every reason to believe that they were entering a safe environment—one that they were invited to enter—and that they were injured in a way that they could not have foreseen. There are several different ways that these injuries can come about.

• Slippery Floors
• Slippery Stairs
• Defective Escalators/Elevators
• Unstable Stair Railings or Fixtures
• Unstable Chairs

When a commercial establishment invites you in, they’re implicitly guaranteeing that you’re not walking into what amounts to a hazard to your life and limb. They have responsibilities to live up to. If they don’t, your best option may be to contact a personal injury lawyer. These professionals understand the laws that apply to premise liability inside and out, literally, and they can make sure that you’re represented in court, if need be. You may also receive a settlement from these cases if it’s clear to the premise owner that they were at fault.

Who Is Responsible for Slip and Fall Injuries?

It can be an embarrassing situation to slip and fall in public. Unfortunately though, in many of these situations it can be more than a person’s pride that gets hurt. When we are in parking lots, stores or in other public places it is easy to assume that our surroundings have been checked for safety and will not cause us any harm. When a personal injury occurs either inside or outside due to unsafe surroundings, the person(s) responsible for the property can be held accountable.

There are countless dangerous situations that can occur because of unsafe surroundings. Outside there are hazards such as ice patches in parking lots, uneven sidewalks, potholes and unlit walkways. Indoors we might encounter uneven or damaged flooring, dark staircases and wet floors among many others. Most of these issues are caused due to improper design, construction or maintenance. The owner of the property is usually the one responsible for the security of the premises.

Can a Subcontractor Sue for Personal Injury?

Wikipedia defines a subcontractor as an individual or even a business that signs a contract to “perform part or all of the obligations of another's contract.” This clearly indicates that a subcontractor is not an employee. Rather, a general contractor hires the subcontractor to perform specific tasks related to the overall project.

The financial advantages of hiring a subcontractor are many according to Business Link:

• Flexibility
• Lower cost on salary
• Lower cost on taxes, insurance
• Specialist expertise
• Less reliance on in-house specialists
• Specify duration and type of work
• Mitigation of project risk

Therefore, it seems like a fair question: is the employer or the contractor at fault if a subcontractor injures himself during working hours? After all, the subcontractor is not an employee, and therefore has no such recourse as worker’s compensation. Technically speaking, a self-employed individual has injured himself in the course of a job.