Does A Wet Floor Sign Mean You Have No Case?

So, we see this a lot of times where a client will come to us and say, “I don’t know if I have a case. I slipped and fell and there was a wet floor sign. You know what happens now?” And so, just because there’s a wet floor sign doesn’t mean that you don’t have a case at all. If there is a wet floor sign, the store is acknowledging that there’s some sort of dangerous condition there, right? Because they put that sign there. So it really comes down to what the substance was, how long it had been there. Maybe it was a slippery substance like if it’s sticky that could change our analysis as well.

So just because there’s a wet floor sign doesn’t mean that your case is gone. It doesn’t it doesn’t take away their liability essentially. No it does not take away their liability. I mean they may argue that they warned you that there was a dangerous substance there but that doesn’t take away their liability. Are there other factors like that would make the business liable like you were kind of alluding to?
Like we know the water’s there, but there’s a sign there.

So, are there other things that could come into play that would then prove the business is liable? Yes. A lot of times when we have slip and falls, we take a lot of depositions and depositions are essentially recorded interviews under oath. And so, we do depositions of the employees, depositions of the managers. We’ll request their employee handbook because we want to see if their employees even adhere to their internal policies and procedures. And so we take all those depositions and a lot of times request the surveillance as well because a lot of stores have this video and so we can put the pieces together about that slip and fall. So that would lead me almost to ask about the timing because at least in this case if it’s a wet floor it could be five minutes and someone comes by with a mop and a lot of the evidence is gone. So how do you guys go about timing and those kind of procedures to make sure you have all the evidence or everything you need for the claim? So, if you’ve been involved in a slip and fall, I encourage you to get an incident reported by the manager because that incident report a lot of times will include witnesses that may have seen you fall. It will document the conditions of the scene.

A lot of helpful information we can get from those incident reports and we encourage you to do one if you’ve been involved in one. And I would imagine it it’s a slip and fall at a say it’s a grocery store kind of a public thing. There’s a little bit of an embarrassment factor, but hone in on the fact of still go say something to somebody and make sure you get it documented because you could have an injury and need to file something. Absolutely. So get an incident report and report it also too so nobody else falls and so that make sure they take care of that dangerous condition.