Transcript
Hi, I’m Mike Hancock and today I want to share with you the five most important things you need to do after you’ve been involved in a slip and fall accident.
The very first thing and most important thing that you need to do after being involved in a slip and fall accident is actually take photos of what caused you to fall. Everybody now has cell phones with them and it’s sufficient just to you know take your cell phone out after you’ve gathered yourself and take photos take video take as many as possible to help us help you later on to be able to determine that it was the store’s negligence that caused you to be injured and fall.
The second thing you need to do is make a report with the store employees. Most often a lot of our clients who have slipped and fallen in somebody’s store such as a Publix or a Target or a Walmart it actually ends up resulting in significant injuries so most often what will have happened is that you have fallen people have come to your aid while you’re still on the floor and the store manager comes by and actually makes a report what also happens on occasion is that our clients fall and get back up very fast and one of the reasons they do that is they tell us that they felt embarrassed and just wanted to move on so if that happens get back up gather yourself take photos of what happened or what caused you to fall but then immediately go seek out some type of store employee and make a report to the manager of the store. They’ll have what they call an incident report and they will fill out your name and address and contact information they may actually have you write down what happened or they may write it down for you they may have you sign it and sometimes they don’t, but regardless always attempt to get a copy of the report before you leave. Also, before you leave, ask the store employee or store manager for the name of their insurance company, not just the name but the contact information for you to call and make a claim to their insurance company.
The third thing that is extremely important after a slip and fall is for you to obtain the names and contact information for any witnesses that may have witnessed you fall or who came to your aid immediately after you fell.
The fourth thing is to try to find out from these witnesses, and that includes the store employees, an idea of exactly why this substance was on the floor. In slip and fall cases, the law in Florida talks about a “foreign transitory substance.” It’s pretty self-explanatory, but foreign meaning something that wasn’t supposed to be there. Transitory means the thing that is on the floor at one moment but not the next. The substance means that it has to be some type of substance that is on the floor. We have to prove that that foreign transitory substance, whether it’s water, whether it’s a soda that someone had spilled or whether it’s something that had fallen off a shelf such as soap that it had been there long enough that the store employees should have known about it and failed to clean it up or failed to put any type of warning signs to warn you of its presence or we have to prove that they were the ones who actually allowed it to be there. Sometimes it’s not a substance that came from a product, sometimes it’s a substance such as water that is dripping from a refrigerated unit in the store, such as you know on a dairy aisle or on a frozen food aisle. You know you want to look at not just what it looks like, but what’s the color, what’s the feel, is it a watery feel, is it a thicker substance. We also want to know whether it has been there long enough for other people to have walked through it. Some of the evidence that we typically get in that regard are photographs and video of the substance. And we might see, you know, if it’s a grocery store, we might see the little wheels from the grocery cart, we might see that that is tracked the substance and left a dirty print of the cart wheels through the substance and down the rest of the aisle. You might also see other footprints in that substance that are walked in the substance, and then the footprints leading down the aisle, so we want to find any evidence as to how long that substance has been there, and that will allow us to more easily prove that the store was negligent.
And the fifth thing that is extremely important is to seek medical care immediately after you’ve been injured.
So those are the five most important things that you can do for yourself immediately following a slip and fall accident to help us help you have a successful case. I’m Mike Hancock with Hancock Injury Attorneys. If you have any other questions regarding this or any other injury matter, please give me a call or visit our website for other videos and information on slip and fall accidents