If you slip and fall while in someone else's place of business and become injured, you may be able to file a lawsuit and collect damages from the owner of that business. Whether or not you win your case (or are able to build one in the first place) will largely depend on your ability to prove the business owner acted negligently and that this negligence led to your slip and fall accident. While it will be your lawyer's job to establish negligence and build your case, having a basic understanding of what negligence means in this scenario will help you navigate the process.

What is negligence?

In a legal sense, the word negligence refers to a person's failure to execute the care that a reasonable person would take in certain circumstances. Negligence is often accidental. In the case of a slip and fall accident, negligence could be:

• The business owner's failure to do something that would have kept you from slipping
• An accidental action on the part of the business owner that led to your slipping

What are some examples of negligence?

Reviewing a few examples of negligence that could lead to a slip and fall injury will help you understand this concept. Imagine it's a rainy day. People are tracking in water, and the floors are getting wet. Yet, the business owner does nothing to mop up the water. It builds up on the floors, making them slick, so that when you step into aisle 2 to grab your frozen pizza, your feet slide out from under you and you hit the floor. It could be argued that, in this case, the owner acted negligently by failing to clean up the water that was being tracked in. Had he or she kept the water cleaned up, you would not have fallen.

A scenario where an accidental action leads to an injury is as follows. Imagine a stock person is filling shelves. A bottle of oil spills, leaving an oily, slippery residue on the floor. Instead of cleaning it up properly (as one would expect a reasonable person to do), the stock person just picks up the glass and moves on. You slip on the oily residue, and fall to the ground. In this case, the stock person could be said to have acted negligently by spilling the oil and then failing to clean it up properly.

What are the challenges involved in proving negligence?

In some situations, the defendant's lawyer might be able to argue that in fact their client did act like a reasonable, responsible person, yet you fell anyways. For instance, if a business owner was cleaning up water that was dragged in once an hour, but the floor still got slick and you still fell, the defendant could argue that since the owner was trying to clean up the water, they were not negligent. It will be up to the judge to decide which argument is stronger in this case -- your claim that the owner should have done more to clean up the water, or the defendant's claim that the actions being taken to clean up the water were sufficient.

This is why the details are so important in a slip and fall case. The right details can make your argument of negligence stronger and harder for the defendant to argue against. Going back to the previous example, say you have a witness who saw an employee mop up water but skip the aisle you slipped in. This detail could help persuade the judge that there was not enough being done to clean up the water. The employee acted negligently by skipping your aisle, and this led to your fall.

If your lawyer is able to prove that a person acted negligently, and that the negligence led to your fall and the fall led to your injury, then you should have a strong personal injury case. Be sure to give your lawyer as much detail as you can so that they can argue back if the defendant tries to claim they did not act negligently. For more information, contact an experienced personal injury attorney.