Videos are crucial evidence in many personal injury cases, especially those involving slip and fall incidents. Imagine slipping and falling over a puddle of water in a store, with no wet floor sign nearby. You notice a surveillance camera directly above the area. Because of your excruciating pain, you forget about the camera until after seeking medical treatment. Weeks later, you return to the store and inquire about obtaining the footage, but employees tell you it is unavailable. What can an injured plaintiff do when the defendant fails to preserve crucial slip and fall video evidence? Does he or she have any recourse?
Florida Slip and Fall: Importance of Preservation Notices
This scenario underscores why most experienced Florida personal injury attorneys send preservation notices to businesses promptly after incidents. These notices instruct the business to preserve all evidence, including videos and photographs, related to the incident. If the business to preserve the slip and fall video evidence, they may be subject to sanctions. The judge may instruct the jury to presume the slip and fall video evidence would have been harmful to the store’s case. This is adverse inference, one of several sanctions that may apply to the business for withholding evidence.
Under Florida law, there’s typically no duty to preserve evidence unless a party is aware of an incident triggering that duty. If a plaintiff waits a year after an injury to request slip and fall video evidence from a business, a judge may be more sympathetic to the business. You must make sure the business is aware of the need to preserve the video. Surveillance videos often overwrite themselves after a certain period, typically two years. Therefore, if you or your attorney did not provide the business with notice within that period, you may not have access to the video. If your case goes to trial, you want to have the slip and fall video evidence.
Contact Schwed, Adams & McGinley
At Schwed, Adams & McGinley, P.A., our experienced personal injury attorneys have more than 200 years of combined practice representing victims of all sorts of slip and fall incidents, motor vehicle accidents, and many other types of personal injury scenarios. We have experience in cases in which a business at which one of our clients was injured fails to preserve video or other evidence of the incident in which our client was injured. Consequently, we know how to use this failure to preserve critical evidence to obtain maximum compensation for your injuries and other damages suffered. Therefore, if you, a family member or a loved one have been injured or killed in a slip and fall incident, contact the experienced personal injury attorneys at Schwed, Adams & McGinley, P.A. today at 877-694-6079 or [email protected] for a free consultation.
