A person who slips or trips and falls can suffer serious or even fatal injuries. Slip and fall accidents in South Carolina cause hundreds of injuries like traumatic brain injury (TBI) and broken hips or other fractures every year. Falls are particularly dangerous for older people, like many residents who have retired to the Myrtle Beach area.
The circumstances of a slip and fall accident should be examined closely. The owner of the property where a fall occurs may be held legally responsible if he or she allowed unsafe conditions that led to the accident and resulting injury. But a negligent property owner or their insurance company will often try to blame an accident on the victim. That’s when the services of an experienced slip and fall accident attorney like ours at Joye Law Firm can help to make sure justice is served.
If you or a loved one of yours has been injured in a fall accident on someone else’s property in the Myrtle Beach, S.C., area, Joye Law Firm can investigate to determine whether you should be compensated for your medical bills and other losses. Since 1968, Joye Law Firm has helped thousands of accident victims obtain compensation that South Carolina law says they are entitled to receive.
Contact a Myrtle Beach slip and fall attorney today for a free, no-obligation consultation about your legal options today. We pursue personal injury and wrongful death claims on a contingency-fee basis, which means we don’t charge a fee unless we recover money, and we have a track record of success for South Carolinians like you.
Why You Should Hire a Myrtle Beach Slip and Fall Lawyer
If you or a loved has been seriously injured in an accidental fall, you are facing medical bills and probably lost work time, as well as pain and suffering. You may be hospitalized for a lengthy recovery and require surgery and/or rehabilitation to regain full use of your injured body part. You may have suffered an injury that you will not fully recover from.
When such an accident and injury is someone else’s fault, you have a right to seek compensation for medical expenses, lost income and your pain and suffering, including the emotional pain of a lasting injury or disability. Because this is potentially a considerable amount of money, you will need the strength of experienced legal help to obtain it.
If you have a case, your Myrtle Beach slip and fall accident attorneys at Joye Law Firm can submit a demand for compensation to the property owner and their insurer and negotiate a proper settlement on your behalf. Most cases can be settled through negotiations, but if negotiations fail, we can file a personal injury lawsuit and present a persuasive case to judge and jury for you.
A slip and fall accident case may move forward if we can show:
- You were legally on the property, which means the property owner then had a “duty of care” to ensure the property was safe or to warn guests like you of any hazards, and
- The property owner breached that duty of care by failing to keep the property safe or warn of any hazards that existed, and
- The property owner’s breach of duty led to the fall that resulted in your injuries, and
- Your injuries resulted in damages (i.e., losses) that can be mitigated by paying compensation to you.
As such, if you were trespassing at the time of your accident, the property owner had no duty of care to you and you would not be able to file a claim in most cases. You may not be able to pursue a claim if the hazard was something a reasonable person would have known to avoid, such as an open construction pit. These factors may not apply to someone too young, immature or intellectually challenged to understand the concept of trespassing or the danger of an “attractive nuisance,” like an in-ground swimming pool. In such a case, the question becomes whether the property owner did enough to secure the property from children.
The property owner may also be protected from a claim if they can show they did not have a reasonable amount of time to discover and mitigate the hazard. If, for example, you slipped and fell because of a spill in a grocery store, but the store can show that the spill had just happened and someone was on their way to mop it up, that may be a valid defense against liability.
Finally, if the accident was totally your fault – security video shows you staring at your phone as you walk down a Grand Strand sidewalk past a large warning sign and orange caution cones and into a pit – you may not have a case. However, South Carolina law does allow you to recover damages if you were partly responsible for the accident. You may be able to obtain compensation if your fault, or negligence, was not more than the property owner.
When both parties are at fault, their level of negligence is assigned a value in a separate decision – you could be found to be 20 percent at fault, for example – and any jury award is automatically reduced by that amount. If a Myrtle Beach property owner was ordered to pay you $100,000, but you were found 20 percent at fault, they would pay you $80,000.
Here’s How Our Myrtle Beach Fall Accident Lawyers Can Help You
Ultimately, issues like “duty of care,” what a “reasonable person” would have done, whether hazards were addressed in a “timely manner,” special circumstances of your case and degrees of negligence would be decided by a judge and jury if a lawsuit could not be settled out of court.
But to prepare your claim, our slip and fall attorneys would investigate to develop evidence that supports your side of the argument, such as witness statements or security footage, which may show you did nothing wrong. Where you may have made a mistake, we can work to mitigate the impact your negligence might have on your claim. This is work a personal injury attorney working for you will do. The police and courts will not, and the property owner’s lawyers and insurers have an incentive to show that you alone were at fault.
You should speak to a slip and fall lawyer if you incur any costs and losses in a slip and fall accident. In a Myrtle Beach slip and fall case, Joye Law Firm will review the basics of your accident at no charge and investigate on a contingency basis – at no charge unless and until we obtain compensation for you. We want you to have the compensation you are due and will do everything we legally can to secure it for you.
Do You Recognize a Common Slip and Fall Accident and Injury?
You probably understand what happened to you or have a pretty good idea how your loved one was injured. Chances are, we do too. We have seen and worked with many Myrtle Beach residents and visitors injured in slip, trip and fall accidents.
Fall accidents happen in business offices and retail stores, apartment complexes and single-family homes, public parks and on sidewalks, driveways, parking lots and roadsides. The responsible property owner may be a private citizen, a local business owner, the Myrtle Beach city or Horry County government, a civic organization, or an absentee corporate owner (often represented by a manager or other staff). They are all covered by property, business or homeowners’ insurance, which is where a payment to you would come from.
Some of the most common causes of slip and fall accidents include:
- Wet and slippery floors
- Cracked or uneven flooring
- Torn carpeting
- Loose tiles or area rugs
- Torn or loose floor mats
- Electrical cords and wires
- Trash- or debris-cluttered walkways
- Broken handrails
- Loose or broken stair treads
- Potholes
- Inadequate lighting
- Snow and ice
- Slippery surfaces, such as certain stone or glass.
- Malfunctioning escalators and elevators.
When people fall, they are likely to reach out to catch themselves. This often leads to injuries to the hands, wrists and forearms, particularly fractures. In older people, broken hips are a very common fall injury and in victims over 65 years old often lead to a steady decline and premature death. Sometimes, accident victims hit other objects as they fall to the floor or ground, creating primary and secondary blunt-force trauma injuries.
Common slip and fall injuries include:
- Cuts and bruises
- Strains and sprains, particularly to the lower back
- Pinched nerves
- Broken bones, e.g., hands, arms, legs, hips, ribs, shoulders, etc.
- Damaged knees, including torn ACLs (anterior cruciate ligaments)
- Internal organ injuries
- Traumatic brain injury (TBI)
- Neck injuries
- Spinal cord injury, including paralysis.
If you recognize the slip and fall accident you were involved in and/or the injury you have suffered above, you are likely facing a painful and potentially long and expensive recovery. You may never be able to work again.
You need to talk to a Myrtle Beach slip and fall accident lawyer from Joye Law Firm as soon as possible. Some slip and fall injuries can prove fatal, even after the accident and while undergoing treatment. In such cases, family members of the deceased may seek damages in a wrongful death claim against the negligent party. For fall accidents that occurred on the job, we can help you obtain workers’ compensation benefits, including survivor death benefits after a fatal workplace fall.
Contact Our Myrtle Beach Slip and Fall Lawyers Today
If you are dealing with serious injuries suffered in a slip and fall accident that occurred in the Myrtle Beach area, contact Joye Law Firm today. The sooner a Myrtle Beach slip and fall attorney from our South Carolina law firm begins work on your case, the easier we can secure evidence to demonstrate that you deserve to be compensated for your costs and losses.
Contact Joye Law Firm for compassionate, dedicated and experienced personal injury or wrongful death claim assistance. An attorney from our firm will meet with you at no charge and immediately launch an independent investigation into your accident and the injuries you have suffered. Our objective is to recover full compensation for you so that you and your family can move forward with your lives. Call (877) 936-9707 or contact us online now to take advantage of a free legal consultation about your case.
