People falling down have been the basis of endless slapstick comedy routines from the Three Stooges from some of our youths, to Chevy Chase on the early Saturday Night Live. While falling down in real life can cause terrible injuries, many personal injury lawyers shun fall down cases, often known as “slip and fall” cases, believing them to be too difficult to win and unlikely to result in large settlements or jury verdicts. The wariness of lawyers, of slip, trip, and fall cases, is not without reason. Legal hurdles and jury bias can pose formidable barriers to success.

For example, if a fall down occurs on ice and snow, the injured person must show that the ice and snow resulted from an “unnatural accumulation.” Mere failure to keep a walkway clear, even if the danger was known by the land owner, will not support a case. Thus, to have a chance at success in a snow or ice case, the plaintiff might need evidence that a downspout or something placed by the owner or his employees or agents, caused water to spill and freeze onto an area, where people needed to walk. Some careless action by the owner must have created the accumulation of ice or snow that caused the injury. Fall down injuries on a municipal way in Massachusetts, create little incentive for a lawyer to accept the case, because there is a five thousand dollar cap on recoveries for injuries caused by defects in the public way.

There are other examples of fall down cases that might face legal hurdles. If a person slipped on a substance in a store, such as a banana peel in a supermarket, the injured person must present evidence that the substance was on the floor for a sufficiently long period of time that the store management should have known of it and cleaned it up. In some cases, the plaintiff might be able to show that careless safety practices by the store owner or management created a likelihood of the type of hazard that caused an injury. Store slip and fall cases are rarely, however, straight-forward.

Perhaps one of the biggest obstacles to success in a slip and fall case, is the view held by many people – and therefore, some jurors – that people need to look where they are going. Such a view may be very unfair in many cases, but it is not rare. Despite the difficulties, slip and fall, and other fall down cases that result in serious injuries are worth investigating. Sometimes, a determined and creative approach to a fall down case may provide theories of liability, i.e., why the property owner is responsible for the plaintiff’s injuries, that may carry the day. Inadequate lighting should always be considered as a possible culprit in a serious fall down case. Sometimes, the property owner may have thoughtlessly placed a barrier that forced individuals using the property, to walk near or over a hazard. I handled one such case that resulted in a significant settlement. If a severe injury has resulted from a fall on someone else’s property, especially, though not exclusively, on commercial property, a call to an experienced personal injury lawyer, and an investigation of the facts, is advisable.