A Philadelphia property owner is responsible for your fall if they know or should have known about a dangerous condition on their property and did not fix it or warn you about it. Pennsylvania premises liability laws establish property owners’ responsibilities, the legal consequences when they fail to uphold them, and the deadline by which you must make your accident claim.
Call (215) 929-8166 to discuss your Philadelphia slip and fall claim.
When a Philadelphia Property Owner Is Legally Responsible for Your Fall
Pennsylvania law bases a property owner’s legal responsibility on the visitor’s status, pursuant to its adoption of the Restatement (Second) of Torts §343. Under this legal system, property owners owe the following duties to the following types of visitors:
- Invitees: An invitee is someone whom the property owner invites onto the property, usually for financial gain, such as store customers, restaurant patrons, hotel guests, hospital visitors, or fare-paying SEPTA riders. Property owners must inspect for hazards that they would discover through reasonable care and protect against those an invitee would not notice.
- Licensees: A licensee is someone who has legal permission to be on the property, but it is usually for their benefit or their mutual benefit, along with the property owners. Social guests, postal workers, and meter readers are often considered licensees. Property owners are liable for hazards they know about or have reason to know about, but they do not have a duty to inspect their property.
- Trespassers: A trespasser is someone on the property without permission. Property owners only have a legal duty to refrain from willful or wanton misconduct.
- Child trespassers: If a property has an attractive nuisance on it, such as a pool, construction site, or equipment that draws children to it, property owners have a heightened duty to protect children from harm on the property.
A visitor’s status can change. For example, a customer who wanders into a stockroom could go from being an invitee to a trespasser. Additionally, property owners in Pennsylvania are generally not liable for a danger that is known and obvious to the visitor, unless the owner should have anticipated the harm anyway.
An experienced personal injury lawyer can evaluate your case and explain whether you have a good slip and fall claim.
Proving the Owner Knew: Actual and Constructive Notice
Many slip and fall cases hinge on proving that the property owner or party with control over it knew about – or should have known about – a dangerous condition that could injure someone on their property. This typically requires proving one of the following:
- The possessor created the condition – For example, the property owner ordered a worker to dig a hole on their property.
- The possessor had actual notice of the condition – The property owner personally saw or someone informed them of the dangerous condition.
- The possessor had constructive notice of the condition – The hazard existed long enough that a reasonably careful owner should have found it.
A transitory hazard, such as a spill or a dropped grape, requires proving how long it existed. This might not be necessary for longer-term issues that have not been corrected (a broken tile, a raised metal strip, a loose handrail) since such a defect has existed long enough to pose a continued hazard. If the owner knows a hazard recurs frequently, notice can be inferred.
A skilled slip and fall lawyer may be able to obtain evidence of the owner’s actual or constructive notice of the hazardous condition, such as:
- Inspection logs
- Sweep sheets
- Video surveillance
- Incident reports
- Photos of the dangerous condition near the time of the accident
- Prior complaints
- Maintenance records
The business where the accident occurred may have access to this evidence, but it is unlikely to hand it over willingly. A personal injury lawyer can send a spoliation letter, demanding that the owner retain this information so valuable evidence doesn’t get lost, but they must act quickly before the evidence is lost or destroyed.
