Houston Slip and Fall Attorney

Have you suffered a catastrophic injury, such as a spinal cord injury (SCI) or traumatic brain injury (TBI), in a slip and fall accident? If so, you’re not alone. According to the National Safety Council, falls led at least 6.9 million Americans to seek treatment in emergency rooms in 2021.

You should prioritize reporting your accident and seeking medical attention if you get hurt on someone else’s premises in Harris County. After that, your next step should be to reach out to a Houston slip and fall lawyer to discuss your rights.

At Barrera Law Group LLC, we have extensive experience assisting injury victims hold negligent property owners accountable for preventable slip and fall accidents. We want to help you do the same so you can recover a financial settlement. Contact us for a free consultation to discuss your case. We’re ready to speak with you now.

How Slips, Trips, and Falls Happen

Since we handle a lot of these cases in our Houston law office, we often find that the following factors are to blame for these preventable accidents:

• Poor lighting: This could include the non-existence of lights or ones that are just not as bright, burnt out, or as well-placed as they should be, whether near entryways, in hallways, bathrooms, stairwells, and other places.
• Insufficient or ineffective maintenance: This may include leaking pipes, loose railings on staircases, or “jumpy,” malfunctioning escalators that cause users to lose their footing, for example.
• Failures to warn of potential hazards: A grocery store’s failure to post a sign letting customers know a defrosting freezer is causing pooling of water in front of it or that an office building floor was recently waxed and, thus, may be slippery are examples of these.
• Inadequate fall protection provided: This is a common concern on construction sites, for example, where contractors may be working at a significant height without being provided with any harnesses to keep them safely suspended in the air.
• Inadequate or inattentive staffing: This is particularly a factor in nursing homes and hospitals, where residents or patients may feel compelled to attempt to get up and retrieve something themselves despite them not being well enough to do so, perhaps because they’ve called for assistance and not had those requests answered.

Did one of these factors contribute to you suffering a slip and fall or did something else? Whether you were injured in one of these situations or in another manner, we can help you pursue a claim to secure the compensation you deserve.

Where These Falls Occur

Incidents like these can happen virtually anywhere, including:

• In supermarkets
• Doctors’ offices, medical centers, and hospitals
• Schools or colleges
• In office buildings
• Restrooms
• Stairways
• Hallways
• Someone else’s home or farm
• At a swimming pool
• In assisted living facilities
• Nightclubs
• On escalators and elevators
• Parking lots and garages or sidewalks
• Museums and other cultural institutions
• Department stores and any other retail outlets
• Construction sites
• Entertainment venues, like trampoline parks, sports arenas, movie theaters, etc.
• Oil field platforms
• Government buildings

We think you get the point. There’s virtually nowhere where slips and falls cannot occur.

Slip And Falls Often Occur in the Workplace

Above, we spoke about how slips and falls can occur virtually anywhere.

Data published by the Texas Department of Insurance cites falls as the number one cause of death among construction workers in our country. Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) research from 2021 shows how at least 351 out of 1,008 construction-related fatalities that year involved a building contractor falling to their death at a lower level.

Fall injuries in the construction industry are common, but that’s not the only workplace they occur in. Slips and falls occur on a wide range of job sites due to:

• No access to safety equipment
• Use of faulty equipment (like stairwell handrails in an office building)
• Issues with scaffolding or ladders
• Slick surfaces (such as the accumulation of cleaning solvents in an entryway or water on a bathroom floor)
• Cracked or uneven flooring
• Violence (i.e., inadequate visitor screening or security protocol in place leading to assaults)
• Insufficient training or supervision (such as failing to demand that workers wear skid-proof footwear if they regularly traverse greasy restaurant floors)

As you can tell, one could likely go on and on with different factors that could make workers prone to slips and falls. Work-related injury cases like these unfold a bit differently from ones involving others going about their everyday tasks. Our legal team is more than qualified to advise you on how to handle your employment-related fall case. Contact us now for help.

What To Do After Slipping and Falling on Someone Else’s Premises

There are a few key steps you should take no matter how serious you perceive your slip and fall to be, including:

Step #1: Report the Incident

You should do this to the business owner, landlord, property manager, or facility management right away whenever possible. If the fall renders you unconscious and unable to do so, you will want to do so (or have someone else do so) on your behalf as soon as possible. Calling the police to make a report is also an option.

Why is reporting the slip and fall incident necessary? It documents what happened, which can come in handy if you opt to file a liability claim or lawsuit against any responsible parties.

Step #2: Consider Photographing or Making a Video of the Scene

Like any incident report created, photographs or videos of the hazards that existed that caused you to fall or your injuries can prove invaluable in building a strong case. If possible, take this photographic or videographic evidence while waiting for a report to someone to make a report or for an ambulance to arrive (if you summoned one).

Step #3: Call Paramedics to the Scene or Go See a Doctor Right Away

A slip and fall accident can take you by surprise, leading you to experience a burst of adrenaline immediately after the incident. This can mask the true severity of any underlying injuries it may have caused you to suffer. Thus, even if you don’t feel like you’re hurt, it’s imperative that you seek medical attention right away.

Receiving medical care is particularly important if you struck your head on anything as you fell to the ground, slid into your resting place, or had a particularly hard fall. However, visiting an urgent care facility or emergency room should occur no matter what. It’s also important that you are amenable to any testing your medical team recommends and that you continue your treatment until they release you from their care.

Step #4: Take Down Eyewitness Contact Information

Scan the scene as you wait for paramedics to arrive to see if anyone in the area saw what happened. If they did, be sure to take down their contact information, so that they can be called upon to provide a deposition or testify at trial, if necessary, about what they saw.

Step #5: Speak With a Houston Slip and Fall Lawyer

The serious injuries that slip and falls can cause can have a lasting impact on victims’ lives, especially if they cause TBIs or spinal cord injuries. Falls like these can also unnecessarily take a person’s life under a specific set of circumstances.

While you may want to speak with a lawyer no matter the harm you suffered, you’ll find that doing so in catastrophic injury cases is particularly necessary, as you’re likely to have significant medical bills, lost wages, and other damages that it’s necessary to secure compensation to pay for. You can expect an experienced legal team like ours at Barrera Law Group LLC to know which legal avenues you can pursue to recoup some of the losses you already have and may incur in the future.

The attorneys in our office regularly meet with prospective clients for free to discuss any potential legal options available to them, and we’re ready to meet with you to do the same. So, contact us now.

What Is the Slip and Fall Law in Texas?

The same Texas laws that apply to almost any other dangerous property situation are also applicable to slips and falls. Put quite simply, these laws allow victims to hold property owners liable for injuries and associated damages if they’re hurt on someone else’s premises. This is especially the case if it occurs because there was a hazard, like a broken pipe in a bathroom, that went unaddressed and created a hazardous situation where a slip and fall might occur, and property ownership ignored it, as opposed to fixing it.

How Long After a Slip and Fall Can You Sue?

The section of state law that outlines the filing deadline for civil actions like slip and fall lawsuits is Texas Civil Practice & Remedies Code §16.003. It outlines how injury victims generally have two years to file a lawsuit or they may forever forfeit their right to do so.

Compensation Available to Injury Victims

Injuries are both costly to treat and can significantly impact your quality of life. While no amount of compensation can take away the fact that you suffered harm, any settlement recovered by filing a claim can at least help you address all the past and future expenses you have or are expected to incur, plus other accident-related noneconomic, such as:

• Medical bills
• Lost wages
• Loss of enjoyment of life
• Pain and suffering
• Mental anguish

How Much Is a Slip and Fall Case Worth in Texas?

Prospective clients of ours here at Barrera Law Group LLC often ask this question during their initial consultations with our attorneys. It’s not an easy one to answer, though, as various factors figure into how much a slip and fall case is worth, such as:

• The extent of your injuries and your existing and future medical costs
• How much time you missed from work and whether you’ll be able to return to the job and in the same role
• Your age or health status before your accident
• How significantly your accident and injuries has impacted your quality of life

Of course, the above are only just a few examples of factors that may impact your case’s value. As you can likely tell, they may mean that it has a worth of anywhere between thousands of dollars, if you had bruising or relatively minor cuts, or millions, if it caused you to suffer a TBI or become paralyzed.

You can expect the Houston slip and fall attorney you meet with to carefully examine the different factors referenced above when they attempt to calculate what your case may potentially be worth.

Challenges to Legal Liability for Fall-Related Injuries

Like most other injury cases, no Texas law states that you must hire a slip and fall attorney in Houston to pursue a personal injury claim like this. You can certainly move forward with an insurance claim or lawsuit on your own. There are reasons you shouldn’t, though, which include the fact that a property owner (or other responsible party) is unlikely to agree to settle without putting up a fight. Instead, they’re likely to:

• Argue that they were unaware of the hazardous situation on their premises
• Claim they took all necessary precautions to keep you and others safe
• Contend that you did something inappropriate that contributed to your suffering harm

Putting them on notice that you’re hurt and intend to pursue them for damages is, sadly, risky enough in itself as it may prompt them to destroy any evidence that points to their liability for what happened. If this were to happen, it could make it quite challenging to prove any case.

Suffered a Fall Injury? You Need Barrera Law Group LLC

You can count on the attorney you work with from our office to conduct as much investigatory groundwork as possible prior to filing any claim or lawsuit. Additionally, if we do find ourselves needing to take legal action on your behalf, you can rest assured that we’ll strategically file any motions necessary to preserve evidence critical to proving your case along with any lawsuit so that there’s less of a chance of it being destroyed and legal ramifications if it occurs.

Slip and fall cases like these are particularly complex to prove, and you better bet that most defendants who are businesses are going to be backed by a team of lawyers to push back on liability and minimize the potential of having to make a payout. This is why having a strong legal team to back you is critically important if you want to secure a financial settlement in your case.

If you’re ready to discuss your accident and the injuries it caused you to suffer, call or contact us online now. We’ll connect you with a Houston slip and fall lawyer who has a solid track record of building strong cases that command top-dollar compensation for our clients’ losses. So, contact us at Barrera Law Group LLC for help now.