The legal principles under which premises liability is established are long-standing. In Florida, a property owner has a duty to keep its premises in a reasonably safe condition and to protect an invitee or licensee from dangers of which the owner is or should be aware. Further, when latent perils exist, the property owner has a duty to timely remedy or warn an invitee or a licensee of those perils. Applied to an every day situation, if a person slips and fractures their ankle, and the cause for which the person fell was a known condition, the property owner is liable for the invitee’s injuries.
In almost 40 years, Leesfield & Partners has resolved hundreds if not thousands premises liability cases. Recently Tom Scolaro reached a $7,000,000 settlement for a paralyzed plaintiff who was caused to fall from the balcony of a friend’s apartment. The nature of property owners can vary greatly, they include residential landlords, condo associations, grocery stores, nightclub, parking lots, or even city sidewalks. The reasons why one may have a claim are almost endless, and they include examples such as an unreasonably dangerous floor surface, a hidden defect in the ground or sidewalk, lack of lighting, slippery painted floors, flying umbrellas that are unsecured, staircases that violate the florida building code, high and unmarked thresholds, and many more.
If you or a loved one sustained a serious injury with surgery as a result of a property owner’s negligence, contact our law firm immediately at 305-854-4900 to allow us to review your potential claim.
To help our investigation in your potential claim, we will need to review photographs that depict the scene of the incident. To that end, it is crucial that you or someone you know return to the scene of the incident as soon as possible and take photos of the area in question. Photographs not only will help us understand how the incident occurred, and how a property owner may be negligent and liable for an individual’s injuries, but most importantly, they will assist us at trial and show to the jury the condition that caused your incident. It is also important that we contact witnesses to the incident and obtain affidavits from them to further and strengthen our claim of negligence.
Depending on the injuries sustained and on the evidence we are able to gather in order to establish liability, your case could be resolved within weeks of retaining our firm or years, also depending on how the defendant decides to defend the case.