Slip & Fall Attorney in Hammond

While slip and fall injuries might not seem so serious at first glance, the fact is that they cause fully half of all accidental deaths at home and thousands of deaths across the country every year. If you’ve been injured in a slip and fall accident, you might have been one of the 8 million people a year who visit the ER for a slip, trip, or fall injury.

If you’ve suffered a slip and fall on someone else’s property, you could be eligible for compensation under premises injury law. Premises injury is an area of personal injury law that relates to a property owner’s responsibility for injuries occurring on their property.

By law, a Hammond property owner is required to keep their premises free of dangerous conditions that could harm visitors, or at least warn people about the existence of these conditions. Properties as diverse as businesses, private homes, apartment complexes, grocery stores, playgrounds, and parking lots are all bound by these rules.

Proving that the property owner acted negligently, leading to your injuries, can be a complicated process. If you find yourself injured after a Hammond slip, trip, or fall, you need a dedicated injury lawyer on your side to recover the compensation you deserve.

What Causes Slip and Fall Accidents?

Slips and falls injure nearly one million people a year badly enough to go to the emergency room. The vast majority of these accidents are completely preventable through proper premises maintenance or warnings:

• Wet or uneven surfaces are far and away the biggest cause of slip-and-fall injuries, accounting for 55% of all accidents in the United States. Property owners can easily prevent these surfaces by regularly cleaning or maintaining floors, or by posting signs alerting passersby to the hazard.
• Weather conditions, while themselves uncontrollable, can be mitigated with proper safety behaviors and protocols. Some of these can include shoveling sidewalks or plowing streets after a snowstorm, or ensuring proper drainage off of a street.
• Improper training, especially in the construction industry, leads to a large number of injuries in the workplace, including slips and falls. It’s vital that employees in dangerous industries are trained to prevent the likelihood of a dangerous accident. If they’re not, the business could be held liable in the event of injury.
• Improper footwear causes nearly a quarter of all slips, trips, and falls, usually due to bad traction on a slippery surface. These types of falls can happen anywhere: at home, at work, or in public.

Injuries You Could Sustain in a Slip and Fall

Because slips and falls are unexpected and can happen anywhere, they are one of the biggest causes of major injury. According to the CDC, slips, trips, and falls are particularly dangerous for older adults over 65. Any of these injuries could be caused by slipping and falling unexpectedly:

• Neck or back injuries
• Spinal cord injuries, possibly leading to paralysis
• Head injuries resulting in brain trauma
• Sprains, strains, and broken bones
• Emotional trauma

Proving Liability in Your Slip and Fall Case

Even with the severity of many slip and fall cases, proving that the property owner was negligent, and therefore liable for your injuries, can be a complex and delicate process. Every case is different, and you’ll have to prove that the owner was negligent enough to have caused the dangerous condition that led to your injury.

This means that you’ll have to prove that your injury was caused by a danger that the property owner either knew about or should have known about, that the danger presented an unreasonable risk, and that a reasonable person could not have anticipated the condition that led to your accident.

You’ll have to prove one or more of the following points to establish liability in your claim:

• The owner, manager, or an employee created the condition
• The owner, manager, or an employee knew of the condition but failed to fix or mitigate it
• The condition existed for long enough that a reasonable owner would’ve discovered it and fixed it

Many slip and fall accidents fall under the purview of the third point above, which is the hardest to prove. For this reason, you’ll need a competent slip and fall lawyer to advocate on your behalf.

What to Do After a Slip and Fall Accident

After you’ve slipped, fallen, and injured yourself on another’s property, the following will help to ensure you can recover the maximum compensation for your claim:

1. Get medical help for your injuries. Not only will a doctor treat and document your injuries, a jury or judge may take your failure to see a doctor as an admission of non-injury. In addition, some symptoms could take hours, days, or even weeks to present, so seeing a doctor as soon as possible could save you pain and suffering in the long run.
2. Report the accident to the property’s manager, owner, or landlord. Also write down what happened to you and get their records of the event before you leave the premises. You’ll also need to report the accident to your insurance, since the property owner will do the same.
3. Document everything that happens, including witness contact information, photos of where you fell, what you were doing in the lead-up to the fall, and its time and date. You should even store the clothes and shoes you were wearing somewhere safe, since they could be used as evidence in legal proceedings.
4. Don’t talk to anyone but your personal injury lawyer. The property owner will try to avoid paying out any damages, and they’ll try to use anything you say against you. Even your insurance will try to settle with you as quickly as cheaply as possible, which could leave you on the hook for a number of your medical and related costs.

When you slip and fall, call Gordon McKernan Injury Attorneys at 985.888.8888 for a free consultation today. We’ve helped victims of Hammond slip and fall accidents for decades, and we can help you too.