If you have only experienced slip-and-fall accidents as punchlines in cartoons and TV shows, you may think they are not particularly dangerous when they happen in the real world. However, if you were recently involved in this type of accident, you know how harmful and even life-changing an unexpected fall can be, especially if it leads to you falling off a high surface or landing on top of a hard one.
Fortunately, people who get injured in this way can sometimes recover financially for their injury-related losses by filing suit against a negligent landowner with our personal injury attorney’s assistance. If you believe someone else’s substandard property management was the main cause of your slipping or tripping injury, you should make contacting and retaining our Southfield slip and fall lawyers a top priority.
When Can a Slipping or Tripping Hazard Justify a Lawsuit?
Broadly speaking, landowners in Michigan have a duty of care to ensure that lawful visitors on their property do not get hurt while present there. However, the exact nature of that duty of care changes based on whether the visitor is a licensee visiting for their own purposes or an invitee visiting specifically for the landowner’s financial benefits.
For both types of visitors, landowners are expected to provide advance warning of hazards they already have direct knowledge of and are not open and obvious to any reasonable person. They are also expected to fix or at least cordon off those hazards reasonably quickly after discovering them. However, for invitees like retail store customers, landowners also have to inspect their property on a regular basis—either personally or through a subordinate—so they discover new hazards reasonably quickly after they first pop up. As our Southfield slip and fall attorney could further explain, this is why it is sometimes possible to sue over injuries caused by hazards that a landowner did not actually know anything about beforehand.
Seeking Compensation Within Filing Deadlines
Regardless of precisely how a person establishes that a landowner holds civil liability for their tripping accident and injuries, they can demand compensation for all economic and non-economic forms of harm they will suffer. This can include, but is not strictly limited to, things like:
- Short-term and long-term medical expenses
- Short-term and long-term loss of working income
- Expenses related to personal property damage
- Physical pain and discomfort from injuries
- Psychological trauma from injuries or the accident itself
- Lost quality and enjoyment of life
However, under Michigan Compiled Laws § 600.5805, most people who get hurt through a property owner’s misconduct have three years at most to file suit after initially being harmed. Contacting our lawyers sooner rather than later after a trip and fall accident in Southfield is key to achieving the best possible case result.
Get Help from Our Southfield Slip and Fall Attorneys Today
Losing your footing when you are not expecting to can quickly lead to an injury with long-lasting repercussions. Unfortunately, that does not mean the process of seeking civil recovery for that injury will move anywhere near as fast, especially if you try to go through it entirely on your own.
Guidance from our dependable Southfield slip and fall lawyers could make a world of difference in how effectively and efficiently you can demand the compensation you need. Call Thurswell Law at (248) 460-9865 today to discuss your legal options.
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