Can You Really Sue Someone if You Slip and Fall on Their Property?

We’ve all heard a version of this anecdote: An elderly lady steps out of her car in a church parking lot in the dead of winter after a snowstorm. Unfortunately, she slips and falls on an ice patch and breaks her hip. Before too long, the church finds itself the defendant in a personal injury lawsuit, with the elderly lady alleging that her fall was the church’s fault.

Could this really happen in the real world, though? The answer is yes, under certain circumstances.

Owners and occupiers of real property owe visitors to their property a duty to prevent harm and accidents. Thus, a person wishing to recover from a slip and fall accident must show that the accident was caused by a dangerous condition on the property and that the owner or occupier of the property knew or should have known of the dangerous condition. A “dangerous condition” is one that must present an unreasonable risk to a person on the property, and it must have been a condition that the injured party would not have anticipated under the circumstances.

• In order to establish that the property owner knew or should have known of the dangerous condition, the plaintiff must show:
• The owner created the condition,
• The owner knew the condition existed and negligently failed to correct it, or
• The condition existed for such a length of time that the owner should have discovered and corrected it prior to the incident in question

So, in the above (almost certainly apocryphal) example, the church lady likely would not be able to sue the church, since, being winter and it had just snowed, she probably could have anticipated that the ground would be slippery. However, let’s say that, instead of tripping and falling in the parking lot on ice, she slips and falls inside the building on a puddle of water that had been caused by a leaky water fountain. The water fountain had been leaking for several weeks, but the church had not gotten around to fixing it yet. In that case, she would have a much stronger claim, because (a) she would have no reason to anticipate an injury of that sort, and (b) the condition had existed for several weeks, so the church should have discovered it and remedied it before this accident could have happened.