Slip & Fall Attorneys

Most people will end up suffering a slip and fall injury at some point in their life. The lucky ones will sustain only a few bumps and bruises. Unfortunately, many others will sustain a severe injury that disrupts every facet of their lives: physical, emotional, and financial. Those slip and fall victims deserve compensation for their injuries. The experienced slip and fall attorneys at Jacoby & Meyers, LLP can help. Contact us today to learn more.

How Jacoby & Meyers, LLP, Helps With Slip and Fall Cases

For nearly 50 years, the lawyers at Jacoby & Meyers, LLP have provided straightforward, sophisticated, compassionate legal representation to people who have sustained severe injuries because of someone else’s harmful actions. Our firm boasts an impressive track record of results, having handled thousands of cases and recovered hundreds of millions of dollars in total for our clients through settlements and jury verdicts.

No matter where you live and what type of injury you suffered in a preventable slip and fall incident, our team has the skill, resources, and know-how to advise you about your rights to compensation. Clients who hire us get lawyers who provide intelligent, personalized legal advice and who fight for fair, just compensation in court and out.

Slip and Falls Statistics

Believe it or not, falls are the third leading cause of deaths from unintentional injuries in the United States. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), slip and fall injuries affect over one million Americans annually, and result in over 34,673 deaths. The CDC also estimates that about one out of five individuals who slip and fall will suffer some type of severe injury, including spinal damage, complex fractures, and brain trauma. Elder Americans face an especially high risk of sustaining life-altering, or even life-ending, injuries in a preventable fall.

How Slip and Falls Happen

Slip and fall injuries occur anywhere people might lose their footing and take a tumble. At Jacoby & Meyers, LLP, many of our clients have sustained serious injuries in falls on:

  • Wet floors that someone should have mopped and posted a warning sign about;
  • Uneven and poorly-lighted stairs, or stairways with unsafe or missing handrails;
  • Aisles and hallways cluttered with products or debris;
  • Uneven sidewalks and walkways paved with broken or cracked bricks or pavers, or covered in torn or bunched-up carpet;
  • Floors that have broken tiles or loose floorboards.

Our clients have encountered these and other dangerous property conditions that could lead to a slip and fall injury in just about every setting imaginable, including:

  • Parking lots and sidewalks
  • Restaurants and bars
  • Movie theaters
  • Large stadiums and sporting arenas
  • Retail stores, including department stores, boutiques, grocery stores, large malls, strip malls, etc.
  • Amusement parks
  • Retirement homes or nursing homes
  • Construction sites
  • Business offices
  • Private homes

No matter what caused you to slip and fall, and no matter the type of property where your fall happened, the experienced slip and fall lawyers at Jacoby & Meyers, LLP want to hear from you. You may have the legal right to receive significant financial compensation for your injuries.

The Law of Slip and Fall Injuries

People too often blame themselves for falling and getting hurt. However, more often than many people realize, falls resulting in serious injury occur because someone responsible for maintaining the property where that fall happened did not take adequate steps to keep visitors safe. Under the laws of most states, those landowners and operators owe financial compensation to the person who fell and got hurt.

What the landowner or operator should have done to keep a property safe can depend on the context. In most states, owners and operators of premises owe the highest duty of care to so-called invitees—people who come onto the property for the owner or operator’s benefit. You are an invitee when you shop at a store or dine at a restaurant, for example. Owners and operators must take all reasonable steps to keep premises safe for invitees, which includes fixing dangerous conditions that could lead to a slip and fall, warning visitors about dangerous conditions not-yet-fixed, and keeping visitors away from dangers that the owners cannot eliminate.

Owners and operators owe a slightly lesser, but still significant, duty of care to people the law refers to as licensees. A licensee is someone who goes onto property principally for their own benefit, rather than the property or business owner’s. A party guest is usually considered a licensee, for example. Owners and operators must warn licensees about slip and fall dangers that are not obvious, and must not do anything that intentionally puts a licensee in danger of falling and getting hurt.

Finally, owners and operators owe a low duty of care to adult trespassers—people who enter a property without permission. They must only avoid doing something intentionally harmful to a trespasser in most circumstances. However, owners and operators usually do have an obligation to take steps to prevent falls on their properties by child trespassers, by installing safety measures that keep children away from any area where a fall could lead to serious injury.

At Jacoby & Meyers, LLP, we have helped people obtain compensation for injuries they sustained as invitees, licensees, and trespassers. Contact us to find out who may owe you compensation for the injuries you suffered in a preventable fall on someone else’s property.

Compensation for Slip and Fall Injuries

If a property owner or operator owes you financial compensation for your slip and fall injury, you may wonder how much? As lawyers with years of experience representing victims of preventable slip and fall injuries, we know the answer to that question depends on a wide variety of factors. At Jacoby & Meyers, LLP, we can never guarantee that someone will receive compensation for an injury. But, we can promise to work our hardest to put our clients in the strongest legal position possible to recover the money they deserve.

For a typical slip and fall injury, our firm will often pursue property owner and operators for compensation that pays our clients for:

  • Medical expenses resulting from the slip and fall injury, including expenses already incurred and future expenses our client will have in connection with the harm caused by the fall. This includes the costs of insurance co-pays, hospitalizations, stays in long-term care, medications, and medical equipment, for example.
  • Non-medical expenses connected to the slip and fall injury, especially the cost of what we call replacement services—hiring someone to help you with tasks that your slip and fall injury temporarily, or permanently, prevents you from performing on your own. This might include the cost of in-home care, paid transportation, or childcare services, for example.
  • Lost wages you missed-out on earning while healing from your slip and fall injury, and any future wages you lost the ability to earn because of your injury. Some severe slip and fall injuries, like brain and spinal cord trauma, can make it impossible for a slip and fall victim to return to work altogether. Disability payments might cover some of the financial harm that kind of injury can do, but our clients often have the right to take legal action against property owners and operators for the rest.
  • Pain, suffering, and diminished quality of life resulting from a slip and fall injury, which might not come with a price tag attached, but is no less real and causes no less difficulty than piles of bills and missed time from work.

Talk to the team at Jacoby & Meyers, LLP today to learn about the types of compensation you may have a right to recover for your slip and fall injuries.

Steps to Take After a Slip and Fall Accident

The actions you take after getting hurt in a preventable fall can affect your legal rights. Here are some tips to follow that can benefit your long-term physical, financial, and legal wellbeing.

Always Seek Medical Treatment

Whether or not you think your injuries are significant, get checked out by a medical professional right away. A doctor can examine you for hidden injuries that might not show symptoms right away, but if left untreated could cause you major problems. Seeing a doctor also generates medical records that can help to prove a claim against a property owner whose actions led to your fall.

Report Your Fall

Try to let someone connected to the property know right away that you fell and got hurt. It is best to do this immediately, if possible. If you need help reporting a fall, talk to an experienced attorney.

Gather Information

If you can do so safely without putting yourself in danger, take pictures or video of where your fall happened, before the property owner or operator tries to fix the dangerous condition that contributed to it. Get the names and contact information for anyone who saw you fall, too. This information can come in handy in proving a legal claim.

Watch What You Say

Do not blame yourself for the fall. For now, do not blame anyone directly. Just take note of what happened, and of the condition that caused your fall. Stay off of social media, and do not get into a conversation with the property owner or operator, or an insurance company, about legal liability or damages.

Call a Slip and Fall Attorney

Let an experienced slip and fall injury attorney at Jacoby & Meyers, LLP, do the talking for you. The sooner you contact a skilled lawyer about your slip and fall injury, the better your chances of recovering the compensation you deserve for your injuries.

How Jacoby & Meyers, LLP, Can Help

At Jacoby & Meyers, LLP, we have decades of experience representing people who have slipped, fallen, and sustained severe injuries, all because of a dangerous property condition that the property owner or operator should have fixed or warned them about. Every client we represent receives personal attention and legal advice tailored to that client’s specific needs. For that reason, the steps we take on behalf of a client can vary from case-to-case.

With that said, in a typical slip and fall matter, Jacoby & Meyers, LLP lawyers will often:

  • Gather evidence: Our team knows that quick action to preserve evidence can often make the difference in how much compensation a client might recover. We often take immediate steps to make sure crucial evidence, like surveillance camera footage or invoices for repair work, does not go missing.
  • Identify who has liability: It might not always be obvious whose poor decisions and dangerous actions led to your preventable fall. One company owns a building, another leases it, and a third does work there. At Jacoby & Meyers, LLP, we dig into the facts to identify every individual or corporate entity who may have a legal liability to our client for slip and fall injury damages. Sometimes, more than one legally-liable party turns up, which is fine with us. No matter how complicated the facts of a slip and fall case, our team has the resources and know-how to handle it.
  • Negotiate settlements: The vast majority of slip and fall legal claims in the United States get resolved through a negotiated settlement. That does not mean, however, that all settlements are equal. To get the best settlement, slip and fall injury victims need a lawyer with years of experience and practice in taking the facts and the law of a case and presenting it in a way that leaves the property owner or operator, and its insurance company, no choice but to offer the maximum compensation available to resolve our client’s claim.
  • Go to trial, if necessary: Even skilled negotiators like the team at Jacoby & Meyers, LLP sometimes find that compromise does not present the best course of action. Instead, in those cases, a client needs a lawyer who has the sophistication and street smarts to make the case for damages to a judge and jury. We are a team of top-notch trial lawyers. We prepare every case as if it will go to trial, so that if that is where the matter leads, we’re ready, eager, and able to do battle in the courtroom.

Call Our Slip and Fall Lawyers Now

Have you or a loved one suffered a preventable slip and fall injury because someone’s dangerous actions put you in harm’s way? If so, then the skilled slip and fall lawyers at Jacoby & Meyers, LLP want to hear from you, no matter what corner of the country you call home. Contact us today online or at (877) 565-2993 for a free case evaluation.

Client Testimonials

“If it were not for the integral legal team of experts at Jacoby & Meyers I would not be where I am today with my recovery. I highly recommend hiring Jacoby & Meyers should you ever find yourself injured in an accident, and an individual or company needs to be held accountable for their negligence.” -C.J.
★★★★★

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