What Evidence Is Essential to Prove Liability in a Slip-and-Fall Case?

So the question is about what evidence is essential to prove liability in a premises liability case, which a lot of people call slip and fall cases. And they’re not always slip and fall cases. A premises liability case can be all different types of injuries, and the idea is when you’re on a certain premises and those premises have some type of defect on them. That causes you to be hurt then they’re responsible. And it could be a slip and fall, or it could be in the Cincinnati area. There was a case you know several years ago now, where a woman’s just walking down the street and crumbling brick masonry falls off a building and hits her in the head. That’s premise is liability too, and that was a terrible case. She was horribly injured. So what evidence do we need? These cases are especially challenging for a couple of reasons. First of all, all the evidence is in the other side’s possession, right?  If you do take something more like a fall inside a grocery store, for example, and create any reason you want for that fall that makes you feel like the grocery store is responsible. You’ve got a situation where they may have cameras, but I can tell you right now that it’s very rare that they’ll turn that camera footage over to you so that you can see what happened independently and make a decision on what you think it looks like in terms of liability. They may have filled out an incident report, but very often, they won’t turn over that incident report to you. They may have had different employees witness what happened. They won’t make those employees available for you to talk to, so that you can figure out what happened. So for us, when we’re representing someone who’s injured, very often, we walk into these cases in a complete vacuum of information other than what our client has told us and what the client’s family or whoever was with them at the time has told us. And then we have to piece those things together. I know people don’t think this about personal injury lawyers, but we do try to avoid filing lawsuits when we can. If it’s a lawsuit that wouldn’t be successful because the other side’s not liable, obviously we don’t want to put our time and our money resources into that, and then get nothing in return because we lose. On the other hand, even if it’s a case that we can successfully win, you know, usually our clients value us resolving the case efficiently as well as for an amount of money that compensates them for what they lost. And if we have to file that case in court, it’s going to be much longer and much less efficiently done. So we only file when we have to. And one of the frustrations I have is, you know, if I contact one of the say department stores or grocery stores in the area, and I say “Hey, I’ve been hired to investigate this. We know this happened on the property on this date, and the ambulance took the person away. Can you give me an incident report or any video footage that you have?” They shut me down. They say no, we’re not going to give you anything, and the only way I can get it at that point is if I file the lawsuit and then subpoena the information through a court. And so I often complain in those cases that essentially the defendants are forcing us to file the lawsuit and then blaming us for doing so when all too often, if they provided me with that information, it would give me something that would maybe make me think that if a lawsuit shouldn’t be filed at all. Maybe make me think that there’s comparative fault here on both sides, and talk to my client about what they can expect which might allow us to mediate without filing and settle the case. And unfortunately, the department stores and the  grocery stores – they don’t all see it that way, and so they wind up waving the red flag at us and we have no choice but to charge.