Proving Why a Person Fell
I’m Katelyn Holub, an attorney focusing on personal injury law in northwest Indiana.
Welcome to Personal Injury Primer, where we break down the law into simple terms, provide legal tips, and discuss personal injury law topics.
Several of our episodes deal with people being injured after falling in a store, restaurant, or other building. Or, falling outdoors on a defective sidewalk, or a defective parking lot.
In many cases, the cause of a fall is readily apparent.
Suppose a person falls going down a staircase in an apartment building where the handrail is broken and there is nothing to hang onto. The failure to provide a handrail violates nearly every building code. Establishing that the lack of a handrail contributed to the cause of the fall is not terribly difficult.
Suppose someone falls on broken and cracked concrete on a sidewalk, or a large pothole in a parking lot. Again, it may not take an expert to prove what caused a fall in such a case. But, an expert may be needed to establish the level of reasonable care expected in maintaining a sidewalk, or parking lot.
Some fall cases can be very complicated to prove, however.
You might be wondering just how does one go about proving that a floor surface was unreasonably slippery and proving that the unduly slippery surface caused a person to fall?
In such a case, an expert engineer might have to be called in to scientifically measure the slip resistance of a surface.
How does such an expert do this? The answer is by testing the surface with equipment designed to quantify the slip resistance of a floor.
Scientists refer to a number called the coefficient of friction to describe the slipperiness of walking surfaces. The coefficient of friction is the ratio of the frictional force resisting the motion of two surfaces in contact to the normal force pressing the two surfaces together.
That definition is way too complicated. So let’s make it simple.
Everyone would agree that it is much easier to slide or glide across a wood floor wearing socks than it is wearing snow boots.
Why? In scientific terms, the socks have a lower coefficient of friction and are hence more slippery.
In fall cases not only is the condition of the floor important, but the type of footwear being worn is also important.
Cleaning chemicals can impact the slipperiness of a floor surface.
We once had a case where a person fell in a hotel bathroom. We discovered that the wrong cleaning chemical was used on the tile floor. An expert was able to establish that the floor was 3 times more slippery than normal because the wrong chemical cleaner caused a thin highly slippery sheen to build up on the floor tile.
Experts can prove helpful in other ways in fall cases.
Fall experts are typically extremely knowledgeable about building codes, and the impact of inadequate lighting on a walkway or stairway.
In sum, proving why someone fell might be easy in some cases, or extremely complicated in other cases. But in both cases, injuries can be serious. And keep in mind, building code compliance and maintaining floors in compliance with safety standards are critical in one other respect. – People tend to rely on the fact that all stairways they encounter will be built to the same standards and that all floor surfaces will likewise be ma