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. 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 one 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 the 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
- The property owner breached that duty of care by failing to keep the property safe or warn of any hazards that existed
- The property owner’s breach of duty led to the fall that resulted in your injuries
- 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’s.
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.
