Why Many Lawyers Hate Supermarket Slip and Fall Cases

We’ve all seen it before. There’s a spill in the supermarket in a busy aisle. Maybe it will be followed by an announcement on the store’s PA system: “Cleanup on aisle 10!” An innocent shopper walks by, slips on the slippery surface, and suffers serious injuries. Any lawyer would be ready to pounce, right?

Not so fast. Many lawyers hate cases like these. They are known as premises liability cases, or, in the vernacular, “slip and fall” or “trip and fall” cases.

Why do so many lawyers hate these cases? The short answer is, they can be a lot of work. News flash here, a lot of lawyers don’t want to work. Maybe they’d rather be playing golf or doing other fun stuff.

Not Rabbi Lawyer. Don’t get me wrong , I love having fun as much as the next guy. But I also love premises liability cases.

Premises liability cases, especially in supermarkets, usually boil down to what is known as “notice.” Did the property owner have “notice”—a fancy way of saying did he/she know that there is/was a dangerous condition on the premises—and fail to remedy the danger?

There are different ways of proving notice. Notice may be “actual notice”—such as when a store employee causes the spill or witnesses it. That employee’s knowledge is imputed up the chain of command; so if an employee knows about it, now the supermarket itself knows about it. The supermarket must take corrective action within a reasonable time period.

What is considered “reasonable?” This is usually a question of fact for the jury—if the case goes to trial. A few short minutes might not be enough time to reasonably expect the supermarket to clean up the spill. But what about 10 minutes? What about 20 minutes? This is where lawyers get to argue to the jury.

Personally, I recently visited Ralphs. Shortly after arriving, I witnessed a store employee restocking the baby food on the shelves. One jar accidentally fell, shattering its contents on the floor of the aisle pictured here. I avoided that aisle, and went about my business.

Twenty-five minutes later, as I was waiting in line to check out, the baby food contents were still on the floor. The employee swept the glass shards but left—or forgot about cleaning up the baby food. Luckily, nobody was hurt. But this would most likely have been considered an unreasonable amount of time to clean up the mess.

Notice in premises liability cases can also be “constructive”. What this means is that the store owner should have known about the dangerous condition—usually because it was there for so long. We argue constructive notice in some of our Los Angeles sidewalk trip and fall cases. Some sidewalks are so bad—and they’ve been this way for years. So we argue that the City should have known about the dangerous condition due to the length of time the sidewalk has been in disrepair.

Supermarkets usually are covered by surveillance cameras. Video surveillance can be key evidence in supermarket slip and fall cases, especially when (as almost always happens) supermarkets argue that the shopper/customer wasn’t paying attention while pushing the shopping cart down the aisle.

As you can tell, supermarket slip and fall cases can be nuanced. Many lawyers hate them because they can be hard work and they can take a long time.

But the Rabbi Lawyer stands ready to assist you in your Los Angeles or Southern California supermarket slip and fall case. Ready to assist, 24/6.