If you are injured by a slip and fall accident while visiting a Tennessee store, you might be left wondering how to win your slip and fall case. Holding the store liable for your accident is not easy. The burden is on the injured party to prove the store owes them for their injuries. This article reviews advice on how to win your slip and fall personal injury case. The steps below provide the best opportunity to recover full and fair compensation.
1 – Obtain Visual Evidence
Common causes of slip and fall accidents include broken and defective walkways, collisions with shopping carts, ice and snow, loose cords and wires, spills of liquids, including water and uneven surfaces. No matter how your slip and fall accident occurred, it is absolutely critical to keep any evidence about how the accident happened. If it is safe and possible to do so, you should also take photographs or video of the location where the accident occurred. A picture is worth a thousand words and can be worth many thousands of dollars.
2 – Notify The Owner or Manager
A retail store might be found to have breached its duty to maintain a safe condition when the store creates a hazard or fails to correct an existing hazard. Conversely, a store might fail to remedy a hazard if another party spills a liquid and creates a risk of a slip and fall accident. To document the failure, you should make sure that the store logs a report that the accident occurred. Request a copy, or have a witness or nearby friend secure a copy. The store owner or manager may decline and unfortunately there is little recourse. This is were having a Slip and Fall injury lawyer is helpful as we can utilize powers of the court to obtain documents through Discovery.
3 – Protect Your Claim
Tennessee Code 28-3-104 states that a personal injury accident, like a slip and fall claim, must be filed within one year. This means that if a person waits longer than one year to file a claim after a slip and fall accident, they will be barred from doing so. Do not wait until the last minute to file a personal injury claim. In many cases where injured parties completely heal prior to this one year mark settlement can be your best method of recovery. Obtaining evidence and proving damages takes time. The sooner the better when it comes to retaining a slip and fall lawyer.
4 – Retain the Help of an Experienced Injury Attorney
To hold a store liable for the injuries caused by a slip and fall accident, an accident victim often must establish several critical elements, which include that a dangerous condition existed in the store, that the store was aware or should have known of the condition’s existence, that the store failed to remedy the condition within a reasonable period of time, and that the condition was the direct cause of the accident victim’s injuries. This is not easy or simple.
The most difficult of these elements to establish are that a store had knowledge of a condition as well as that an unreasonable amount of time elapsed before the store performed actions to clean up the spill. To make certain that each of these elements is successfully established, it is often a wise idea to obtain the assistance of an experienced accident attorney.
If you live in Tennessee and are harmed in a slip and fall accident call George Angelopoulos at 615-422-7171. He has substantial experience helping people harmed because of the negligence of others. We hold them accountable. Consultations are free and no fee unless we win. Our office is located in Franklin, TN and we accept slip and fall injury cases in Nashville and surrounding Middle Tennessee cities.
