After a Coral Springs woman fell on a bag of cornmeal in Walmart, Slip & Fall Lawyers Dell & Schaefer helped her obtain a $15,000 settlement

Foreign Substances Not Cleaned Up by Store Personnel Often Lead to Slip and Fall Accidents

When you slip and fall on a foreign substance in a store, you might not know how long the substance had been on the floor. After all, if you knew the substance was there in the first place, you would have avoided slipping on it! Since you don’t know how long the substance was on the floor, you might think you will have a hard time pursuing a personal injury case against the store. After all, how could the store be liable if the store employees didn’t even know of the existence of the substance?

The answer is that there are other ways to prove that the substance had been on the floor for some time. There is no specific time requirement in order to prove a case. However, there is a concept in the law called “constructive notice” that requires that an injured person bringing a lawsuit show that the substance had been on the ground for long enough that a store employee should have known of the substance’s existence. This can be demonstrated in several ways. For example, dirt or tracks through the substance can show that the substance had been walked through and, therefore, must have been on the floor for some time. These types of characteristics can allow the injured person to establish constructive notice on the part of the store and thus successfully pursue a case.

Negligence at Walmart Causes Our Client Back and Knee Injuries

Our client was a 57-year-old woman, a mother of four daughters and a grandmother. At the time of her accident, she was shopping for food at Walmart. Right before her fall, our client was in the produce section looking for fruits and vegetables. At some point, our client picked up some plantains off of a rack and placed them in her cart. She then began to push her cart. It was at that point that our client’s foot encountered a torn bag of corn meal located on the ground. Our client slipped on cornmeal that had spilled out of the bag and slammed to the ground, badly injuring her back and knee.

After the accident, our client’s knee was bloodied, and she immediately felt pain. She went home hoping that the pain would resolve and she wouldn’t have to go to the hospital. Unfortunately, the pain didn’t get any better, and our client’s condition gradually deteriorated over the next 24 hours.

Pain Does Not Subside so Our Client Visits the Doctor

Two days after the accident, our client went to a medical clinic near her house. The medical clinic ordered some MRI’s and gave our client pain killing medication. Our client also went to a local chiropractor’s office. The chiropractor prescribed our client a strict course of physical therapy. Our client was required to go to therapy two to three times a week. She did this for eight weeks.

When our client didn’t improve, the chiropractor referred her to an orthopedic surgeon. That doctor recommended that our client undergo a series of epidural injections into her back. Our client was extremely nervous about these injections. In spite of the doctor’s point that the injections could improve her condition, our client worried that the injections could also make her worse and she decided to get no further treatment.

Attorneys for Walmart claim store not responsible for negligence despite accident

During her treatment, our client talked to a representative from the store’s insurance company. The insurance representative asked our client if she knew how long the cornmeal had been on the floor of the store. Our client responded that she did not. The insurance representative told our client that she couldn’t prove Walmart was responsible because she couldn’t prove how long the cornmeal had been on the floor. After all, if the cornmeal hadn’t been there for awhile, how could the store have known about it?

Confused by this, our client decided to contact Coral Springs Slip and Fall Attorneys Dell & Schaefer. We told our client that there are other ways of proving how long the substance had been on the floor. For example, our client told us that the cornmeal had been lying next to a torn-open bag. It appeared that the cornmeal had been leaked out of the ripped bag.

Coral Springs Slip and Fall Lawyers Dell & Schaefer Settle Case for $15,000

We argued to the representative of the store’s insurance company that the torn bag was evidence that the bag and cornmeal had been either stepped on or driven over by a cart. Other customers or store employees must have therefore have come into contact with it. This was evidence that the cornmeal had been on the ground for some time.

We also argued to the insurance representative that our client was a grandmother of several small children. She had very close relationships with all of her grandchildren. Before the accident, she would take her grandchildren to the park and play with them on a daily basis. After the accident, she could no longer do this. There were times when our client couldn’t even carry her grandchildren.

These arguments allowed us to resolve our client’s case for $15,000. Our client was pleased with the outcome and was thankful for the help she received from the attorneys at Dell & Schaefer. Call us for a free consultation. No fees or costs unless we recover money for you.

See more Slip & Fall cases we resolved here.