Who Is Responsible for An Exterior Sidewalk in a Florida Slip and Fall?
You are walking towards a branch of your bank, which is on the first floor of a commercial office building, to withdraw some cash when you stumble over a piece of broken pavement outside the front entrance. You trip, break your ankle, and also sustain injuries to the tendons and ligaments that connect to your ankle and help it do its important work in helping you walk. Your injuries require a long hospital stay as well as numerous surgeries to try and correct the issues, which unfortunately become permanent despite the best medical treatment. Although you are still able to walk, you will always have a limp according to your doctors and you cannot participate in some of the recreational sports you previously enjoyed. You need to find out what or who is responsible for the state of the sidewalk. Whose negligence caused your slip and fall accident?
Who is Responsible?
Shortly after the incident, you retain an attorney to assist you in recovering from your injuries from the responsible parties. Your counsel contacts the bank in an effort to try and resolve your potential claim against it and obtain compensation for your injuries sustained as a result of the broken pavement. The bank pushes back, stating that it is not responsible for maintaining the area in front of the bank, which it says is the responsibility of the building’s owner. The building’s owner pushes it off on its property manager, who it says should have been aware of the problem and fixed the broken sidewalk. Everyone passes the buck when it comes to responsibility for your injuries like a game of musical chairs is being played among them. This just does not seem right to you as the victim of someone’s negligence in failing to maintain this sidewalk.
Thankfully, the answer is that someone or some entity, whether the bank, the building’s owner, or the building owner’s property manager, is responsible for the maintenance of that sidewalk and, if there were an open and obvious hazard like a broken sidewalk, then whoever had the legal duty under Florida law to maintain that sidewalk can be held liable for your injuries. However, there may also be other parties that could have owed a duty to you as the injured party. For instance, even if the bank were not technically responsible for maintaining the sidewalk but if bank employees knew about the broken sidewalk and never brought it to anyone’s attention, the bank might also potentially be on the hook for your injuries. But this is something that an experienced Florida personal injury attorney will be able to determine. An experienced Florida personal injury attorney like the attorneys of Schwed, Adams & McGinley can ensure that you seek compensation from all the proper parties in a situation like this and we will go to great lengths to ensure that we seek to hold every possible wrongdoer responsible whose negligence led our client to suffer his or her injuries.
The Duty of Care and Commercial Establishments
Responsibility for maintaining a particular area outside a commercial establishment, like the building this bank branch is located in, can be a complicated legal question that most personal injury victims are not going to be in a position to unravel on their own. The bank’s lease may provide for one thing when it comes to maintenance of the exterior of the building, while the actual sidewalk may be the responsibility of either the building’s owner or that owner’s property manager. However, either way, someone or some party had a legal duty to ensure the sidewalk was not in the state of disrepair in which you found it; In addition, other parties could also potentially be on the hook if they had knowledge of the dangerous condition and did not do anything about it.
Contact Schwed Adams & McGinley
At Schwed, Adams & McGinley, our experienced personal injury attorneys have more than 150 years of representing the victims of slip and falls, trip and falls and all other premises liability and personal injury scenarios in Florida. During their collective decades of practice, our experienced Florida personal injury attorneys have dealt with many defense attorneys and businesses that try to hide behind leases and other contractual arrangements in an effort to pass the buck for their own negligence to those who were injured through no fault of their own on the business’s premises. Our attorneys will always seek to obtain maximum compensation for your injuries, regardless of whose negligence caused those injuries. If you have been injured due to someone else’s negligence in Florida, contact the experienced personal injury attorneys at Schwed, Adams & McGinley, P.A. today at 877-694-6079 or contact@schwedlawfirm.com for a free consultation.