Should You Hire a Lawyer for a Slip and Fall Injury Case?
People with a potential personal injury case usually need a lawyer sooner rather than later, and slip and fall cases are no exception.
When Get an Attorney’s Help?
There are some types of injury cases where you do not necessarily need a lawyer — some workers’ compensation cases and small car accident cases, for example — but, if your injury is at all serious, you should look for a lawyer rather quickly. The reason that you can handle a small car accident case by yourself is that, in a car accident, if the defendant is at fault, the fault is usually obvious.
In contrast, defendants’ fault in slip and fall cases is not often obvious, and insurers in slip and falls cases will rarely acknowledge liability to an unrepresented person. If you have a slip and fall case and do not have a lawyer, you will generally not get very far with your case.
Thus, the attorney’s first job in a slip and fall case is to get the attention of the defendant and the insurance company. You cannot settle a personal injury case without having a line of communication with the insurer.
But even in a small case, a lawyer can help you in many ways. All personal injury litigation boils down to proving liability and damages, and a lawyer will recognize all of the different factors that can affect liability and damages, both positively and negatively.
Proving Liability
In order to get your case in a position to be settled or go to trial, you have to prove liability. This means that you and your lawyer have to prove that, more likely than not, the defendant was negligent, and that the defendant’s negligence played a part in causing your injury. This is often straightforward in a car accident case, but can be far more subtle and complex in a slip and fall case.
The first thing that the lawyer needs to do is to confirm with you how your injury occurred. Falls happen very quickly, and many people do not understand exactly how they went from going up or down stairs to being on the ground and injured.
Here is an example. Let’s say that you fell down some stairs. But that is just the beginning of the inquiry. How did you fall down the stairs? Which foot missed the stairs? What were you wearing on your feet? Were you holding onto the handrail? What, if anything, were you carrying? Which hand were you carrying it in? Were you on the phone? Were you texting? Did your foot trip or slip? Where were you looking while you were going down the stairs?
All of these facts, and many more, are critical facts that the insurer, the defense attorney, and, yes, the jury will want to know before offering or awarding you any money.
But all of this just addresses the physics of how you fell. Now the attorney has to figure out how to hold the defendant legally responsible for your fall. Here are some possibilities for why you fell:
- you missed a step
- you slipped on something on the stairs
- you tripped over your coat, your dress, your belt, or something else
- you reached for something (perhaps a handrail or your phone) and lost your balance
- the risers (the height of each step) were of varying heights, which unknowingly destabilized you as you descended the stairs and caused you to lose your balance and fall
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