Throughout Michigan’s cold, snowy winters and rains year-round, slippery conditions are common. These conditions frequently cause disabling and even life-altering harm.
When property owners in the state fail to adequately maintain safe premises through measures like installing railings, ensuring even flooring, removing tripping hazards, regularly mopping spills or salting pathways, they may bear responsibility for preventable visitor fall injuries per long-established negligence laws.
If you are a Michigan resident and have sustained injury on unsafe, poorly maintained commercial or public spaces, contacting an experienced personal injury attorney Michigan may serve as the best initial step towards determining your rights and options around securing accountability and compensation. Let’s discuss slip fall injuries and the legal framework around them in Michigan.
Dangerous Conditions and Property Negligence
Many Michigan slip, trip and fall injury claims boils can be linked to a property owner’s lapse creating unreasonable, preventable risks ultimately causing harm, otherwise termed negligence. State statutes generally deem owners responsible for proactively identifying and mitigating foreseeable dangers for those lawfully occupying the premises.
Michigan state law covers correcting obvious structural defects like uneven flooring, missing handrails on inclines or steps prone to growing slick with use. It also included operational obligations like promptly cleaning liquid spills in grocery aisles, salting icy patches by building exits, ensuring adequate lighting in parking garages and more.
If a danger cannot be outright eliminated, barricading it off or conspicuously signing wet floors acts as bare minimum due diligence. When proprietors overlook what history shows our courts repeatedly expect, personal injury attorneys can demonstrate how flouting those well-defined duties directly exposes unsuspecting patrons to serious harm.
Proving Fault and Causation
Beyond simply showing a dangerous condition existed in public areas, building a viable personal injury claim for a Michigan slip and fall also relies on establishing clear causation. Skilled personal injury attorneys must illustrate through gathered testimonies, photographs, video surveillance footage and medical reports that a property owner knew or should have known of the state of their premises while failing to rectify risks.
Concurrently, your legal team (claimant) must demonstrate how directly encountering that unaddressed hazard led to the demonstrable fall and subsequent injuries documented in imaging scans, treated through surgery, therapy or medication.
Eyewitnesses recounting events or employees confirming recurring complaints over an unchecked tripping obstacle prove invaluable in connecting dots. It constitutes no small task proving both negligence and causation, hence victims would surely benefit consulting practitioners conversant in these concepts.
Injuries and Damages
If you suffer unexpected falls due to slippery floors or trip hazards in Michigan stores, offices or apartment buildings, you may be harmed severely. Bone fractures at various severity levels are quite common, ranging from minor hip fractures to traumatic head and spinal cord injuries which attract hefty hospitalization and surgical intervention costs.
Depending on case specifics, you may also face considerable lost income over months or years recovering or permanently losing the capacity to continue working certain jobs. Out of pocket medical costs and immediate family expense burdens also pile up rapidly.
Take Note: Documenting every dimension of hardship and connecting tangible numbers to negligent property conditions remains imperative when you seeking fair restitution.
Settlement Factors and Limitations
Once a dangerous property condition and causation gets established by savvy counsel, additional settlement influencing factors enter negotiations between you and your insurer in Michigan. Contributory negligence statutes can proportionally reduce otherwise valid injury claims if you also acted negligently or ignored warnings on site.
The total liability coverage limit held by the property proves pivotal too, capping payout potentials absent rare excess verdicts. More restrictive still, certain pain and suffering damages face tighter caps unlike concrete medical costs and lost wage reimbursements.
Knowledgeable personal injury firms account for these settlement dynamics, demonstrating and quantifying every dimension of loss suffered due to unaddressed premises hazards. Where circumstances warrant, they can also strategically argue for exceptions when constraints appear arbitrarily detrimental towards making victims whole.
Steps to Take after a Slip and Fall
In the direct aftermath of sustaining fall injuries due to unaddressed hazards on third party premises, prompt action will help you secure vital evidence while the sequence of events stays fresh in your mind. Before leaving the site of the incident, attempt to procure contact details of witnesses plus request any security camera footage capturing the area in question.
Take ample photos of the dangerous conditions like liquid spills, uneven pavement, missing handrails or poor lighting at play. Additionally, secure ownership and insurance information for the property at fault. Even for minor initial pains, get examined and retain documentation from medical providers.
Finally, consult an accomplished personal injury attorney in Michigan to properly investigate negligence factors, preserve evidence optimally and coordinate compassionate legal support catering to the unique situation at hand through settlement or merited litigation pathways as warranted.
Michigan laws recognize premises liability civil actions as necessary channels empowering legitimately injured residents to hold commercial and public space owners financially accountable for preventable accidents.
Where negligence causing a hazardous environment gets established as directly causing demonstrable physical or financial harm, victims deserve fair compensations. Experienced personal injury law practitioners understand how to build viable cases meeting evidentiary and legal standards, secure equitable damages and provide compassionate counsel during what often proves an intensely challenging period for you and your family.
