Be careful of slipping and falling in a store in Jersey City, NJ

Slip, trip and falls, as a result of wet floors, or improperly maintained floor mats or rugs can result in serious injury to a patron entering a store.

Likewise, the slip, trip and fall can occur to a patron who has yet to enter the store. Many slip, trip and fall accidents occur in the parking lot before the customer gets into the store. The business owner owes a duty of care to patrons from snow and ice conditions on the entire property including the parking lot. If you experience an injury from a slip, trip and fall in the parking lot or store, the duty of care owed by the business owner is the same.

When a slip and fall occurs to one of our clients at a mall or a large grocery store our first advice is to have the client alert the business of the slip and fall accident. Many times stores try to defend such actions by denying the slip and fall occurred. By immediately notifying security or management that an injury occurred from a slip and fall we diffuse this defense.

Next, it is important to find out if the store, mall, or parking lot is equipped with cameras. Most malls, large grocery stores and other business like Walmart, Lowes, or Home Depot will have video cameras inside and outside the building. If video does exist, nothing can prove your injury from a slip and fall case better. While most video tapes are taped over every 24 hours it is critical to have an anti-spoliation letter delivered to the security or store manager right away. This letter demands that the business owner maintain the video of the slip and fall before it gets tapped over.

Determining what caused you to slip and fall is crucial to the viability of your case:

• Did you slip and fall because of ice?
• Did you slip and fall from snow?
• Was the floor in the store slick or wet?
• Did that condition cause you to slip and fall?
• Did the store have a rug or cardboard on the floor that slipped or move when you stepped on it?

As soon as practical after your slip and fall accident, jot down what caused you to fall. Also take notice of your surroundings. Determine if your clothes got wet from the slip and fall. Take a visual of the condition the ground that caused you to slip and fall. If a good Samaritan comes to your aide, ask that person if he/she saw you slip and fall. If they acknowledge that they saw the slip and fall accident get his/her name and address.

Those are just some tips to keep in mind if you suffer an injury as a result of a slip, trip and fall. The resulting injuries that can follow from slip and fall accidents are devastating. Last year alone one of our clients recovered more than $1 million from a rug that was placed over ice.

If you or someone you know is injured from a slip and fall accident, call The Law Offices of Anthony Carbone, PC for a free consultation.

What the Duty of Care Actually Requires of Store Owners

The duty of care mentioned above is not a vague or abstract obligation. In New Jersey, a business that invites customers onto its property holds the status of a possessor of land, and every person who enters that property to conduct business is a business invitee — the highest classification of visitor under premises liability law. That classification carries significant legal weight. A store owner does not simply have to avoid actively creating hazards. They have an affirmative, ongoing obligation to inspect the property, identify dangerous conditions, and either correct them or provide adequate warning before someone is hurt.

Courts in New Jersey have long held that this duty is not satisfied by a reactive approach. Waiting for someone to report a spill before cleaning it up is not enough if the spill could reasonably have been discovered through the kind of regular inspection a business of that size should be performing. The frequency and thoroughness of inspections that courts expect scales with the nature of the business. A busy grocery store with high foot traffic through its produce and refrigerated sections is held to a more demanding inspection standard than a low-traffic boutique, because the likelihood of a hazardous condition developing, and developing quickly, is much higher.

Maintenance logs matter enormously in this analysis. When a store is sued following a slip and fall, one of the first things a plaintiff’s attorney pursues through discovery is the cleaning and inspection records for the area where the injury occurred. A store that can produce contemporaneous log entries showing regular inspections in the hours before the accident is in a much stronger position to argue it met its duty. A store with no log, or a log showing the last inspection was hours before the fall, faces a much harder road in defending that it acted reasonably.

Why the Parking Lot Is Just as Much the Store’s Responsibility

The point about parking lot liability deserves elaboration because it surprises many people who assume a business’s legal responsibility ends at the front door. It does not. A retail store, mall, or shopping center that controls, maintains, or leases its parking lot owes the same standard of care to customers navigating that lot as it does to those walking the store’s interior aisles.

During winter months in New Jersey, that obligation becomes particularly demanding. Snow accumulation, freezing temperatures, and the freeze-thaw cycles that create black ice on otherwise dry-looking pavement all require active management. A property owner who simply shovels after a storm and considers the obligation fulfilled may not have met the standard of care if ice reforms overnight and customers arrive the next morning to walk across a glazed surface. Property owners who know, or should know, that refreezing is a foreseeable consequence of overnight temperatures in a New Jersey winter have a responsibility to salt, monitor, and re-treat their walkways and lot surfaces accordingly.

The question of who exactly is responsible for parking lot maintenance can sometimes become complicated in larger commercial settings. A mall property may have a landlord who owns the physical lot and separate retail tenants who occupy individual stores. Maintenance agreements between landlords and tenants sometimes allocate responsibility in ways that are not apparent to an injured customer. In litigation, identifying all parties who may share responsibility for the condition that caused the injury is part of the investigation, and it is not always limited to the store where the customer was headed when they fell.

The Anti-Spoliation Letter and Why Timing Is Everything

The anti-spoliation letter mentioned above is one of the most time-sensitive steps in any slip and fall case, and the reason is straightforward. Digital surveillance systems at major retail locations typically overwrite footage on a rolling basis. The standard retention window at many large retailers is somewhere between twenty-four and seventy-two hours for routine footage, though some locations retain footage longer when an incident report has been filed internally. If your attorney is not retained and a preservation demand has not been sent before that window closes, the footage is gone, and in most cases it cannot be recovered.

The letter itself does more than request that the footage be saved. By formally notifying the property owner or store management in writing that the footage may be relevant to anticipated litigation, it creates a legal obligation to preserve that evidence. If the footage is then destroyed after the letter has been received and that destruction can be proven, the consequences in litigation can be significant. Courts can permit a jury instruction known as an adverse inference charge, which tells jurors that they may assume the destroyed evidence would have been harmful to the party who destroyed it. In a case where the store’s defense is that the dangerous condition either did not exist or existed for only a very short time, footage showing otherwise would have been devastating. Jurors can be told to draw exactly that conclusion from its absence.

Beyond surveillance footage, the same preservation principle applies to incident reports prepared by store employees after a fall is reported, maintenance logs, cleaning schedules, and any written communications among store staff about the condition of the floor or lot on the day in question. These are all materials that can be demanded through formal legal process, but only if the litigation is initiated and the demand is made while the documents still exist. Routine document retention policies at many large retailers result in the destruction of routine records after a set period unless a litigation hold is in place.

Understanding the Injuries That Slip and Fall Accidents Cause

The client who recovered more than $1 million from a rug placed over ice represents a real outcome in a real case, and it reflects what slip and fall accidents can do to a person’s body and life. Falls are among the leading causes of serious injury in adults, and the injuries that result are often far more severe than the circumstances of the fall might suggest.

Hip fractures are one of the most common and most serious outcomes of slip and fall accidents, particularly for older adults. A hip fracture typically requires surgical repair, followed by inpatient rehabilitation, and carries significant risks of complications including infection, blood clots, and pneumonia during the recovery period. Many people who suffer hip fractures in their later years never fully regain their pre-injury level of mobility or independence. The long-term care costs associated with these injuries can be substantial.

Wrist and shoulder fractures are common in falls where the instinct is to reach out and catch oneself. The force transmitted through an outstretched arm during a fall can fracture the distal radius, the bone at the wrist, or cause a rotator cuff tear that requires surgery and months of physical therapy. Back and spinal injuries, including compression fractures and disc herniations, can result from the jarring impact of hitting a hard floor, and these injuries can produce chronic pain and functional limitations that persist long after the initial treatment is complete.

Head injuries deserve particular mention. When someone slips on ice or a wet floor and their feet go out from under them, they frequently fall backward, and the back of the skull strikes the ground with significant force. Traumatic brain injuries resulting from falls range from concussions with relatively brief recovery periods to more severe injuries that produce lasting cognitive, emotional, and neurological effects. Even concussions that initially seem mild can have consequences that affect a person’s ability to work, concentrate, and engage in daily life for months.

The Role of Medical Records in Building Your Case

Every piece of medical evidence generated after a slip and fall accident becomes part of the evidentiary foundation of the claim. The emergency room or urgent care record created on the day of the accident documents the initial injury, the mechanism by which it occurred, and the immediate findings of the examining physician. That record is the anchor. Everything that follows, the imaging studies, the specialist visits, the physical therapy notes, the surgical records if surgery becomes necessary, builds on it to create a picture of how the injury developed, how it was treated, and what its lasting consequences are.

Gaps in medical treatment are one of the most reliably used arguments by insurance adjusters defending slip and fall claims. If an injured person stops seeking treatment for several weeks, even for entirely practical reasons like difficulty getting to appointments or inability to take time off work, the insurer’s position will be that the gap demonstrates the injury had resolved. That argument is not always persuasive, but it introduces uncertainty that did not have to be there. Consistent, documented treatment that runs through the recovery period creates a medical record that is far harder to attack.

What Happens When Multiple Parties Share Responsibility

Not every slip and fall at a retail location puts the liability entirely on one party. In complex commercial settings, multiple defendants may bear responsibility for different aspects of the conditions that caused the fall. A contractor hired to perform floor work who leaves the surface in a hazardous condition, a cleaning company whose employee used an inappropriate product that left the floor slippery, or a third-party snow removal service that treated the parking lot inadequately can all be parties whose conduct contributed to an injury.

New Jersey’s comparative fault framework allows a jury to allocate percentages of responsibility across all parties whose negligence contributed to the outcome. An injured customer can recover from multiple defendants in proportion to their respective shares of fault, which means that even when a store argues that a third-party contractor bears most of the responsibility, the injured party is not left without a remedy. Identifying all potentially responsible parties early in the case, before evidence is lost and before the statute of limitations expires, is one of the most important aspects of the initial case evaluation.

New Jersey’s two-year statute of limitations for slip and fall claims begins on the date of the accident. When the defendant is a government entity, including falls on public sidewalks, in government buildings, or on municipal property, a Notice of Claim must be filed within ninety days of the accident under the New Jersey Tort Claims Act. Missing that shorter window permanently bars the claim.

A New Jersey Personal Injury Attorney who handles slip and fall cases understands how to identify all responsible parties, preserve critical evidence before it disappears, and build the kind of documented case that holds retailers and property owners accountable for the conditions they allowed to exist on their premises. The $1 million recovery referenced above did not happen by accident. It happened because the right evidence was preserved, the right parties were held accountable, and the full extent of the client’s harm was properly documented and presented.

If you or someone you know is injured from a slip and fall accident, contact the Law Offices of Anthony Carbone, PC for a free consultation.

Contact Us Today