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Those who own or operate businesses that are open to the public have certain responsibilities to keep their premises safe for those who come onto the property for a business purpose, such as to shop at a store or eat at a restaurant.
When this duty is breached, an injured person has the right to seek monetary compensation for medical expenses, lost wages, and pain and suffering associated with the accident.
Under Kentucky law, a person who is injured on the job is entitled to benefits such as temporary and permanent disability payments and medical expenses. Usually, these benefits are less than what the worker would have received in a negligence case against someone other than his or her employer.
Thus, an employee who is hurt at work may wish to file a personal injury lawsuit against a third party whose negligence contributed to an injury at work. Of course, the third party has an incentive to assign as much fault as possible to the employer, even though the employer is immune from liability in the negligence case.
Attorneys who routinely handle personal injury cases often tell clients that it can take anywhere from a few months to several years for their case to make its way through the courts or settle.
Typically, however, the litigation process does not take anywhere near as long as it did in a case decided in March by the Kentucky’s highest court. In that case, a decade passed between the plaintiff’s initial injury and the court’s decision.
One factor that extended the case’s time in the courts was a change in the applicable law while the case was pending. Unfortunately for the plaintiffs, the court’s decision required their case to, once again, be remanded to the trial court for further proceedings.
Places of business owe certain duties to visitors. One of those duties is safe and secure surfaces for walking. Spills can cause hazardous conditions, and businesses owe it to their visitors to clean up spills and similar hazardous conditions as soon as possible.
When a business or property owner breaches the duty of care that it owes to a visitor, the visitor has a right to seek monetary compensation for medical expenses, lost wages, and pain and suffering caused by the accident. This gas station fall case went to the Kentucky Court of Appeals, which sided with the injured person in the lawsuit.
There is no question that some dogs are more dangerous than others, or that almost any dog is capable of an attack under the right circumstances. What responsibility should the owner of a dog with dangerous propensities – or the owner of any dog, for that matter – have toward the general public?
A Kentucky appellate court addressed this issue recently in a case in which a woman was severely injured by a pack of dogs during a hunting trip.
Say the words “slip and fall” and “grocery store,” and a mental image of a shopper sliding across the produce section on a banana peel inevitably comes to mind. It’s so cliché that it’s almost humorous – unless you are a person who broke a bone or herniated a disc in a fall.
The fact is that there are many serious injuries in grocery stores in Kentucky and across the nation each year, many of which could have been avoided had the store fulfilled its duty of care to the customer.
Generally speaking, businesses such as retail stores, restaurants, and even hospitals have a duty to keep their premises in a reasonably safe condition. When a business fails to do so, it can be held liable for the resulting physical injuries (or even a guest’s wrongful death). Those injured or the family of someone who died can file a premises liability lawsuit.
However, such cases are sometimes difficult to prove, and the plaintiff has the burden of establishing the defendant’s liability. If the plaintiff is unable to make out a case of negligence, he or she will not be able to recover any monetary damages, regardless of the severity of the injuries sustained in the accident.
Each year, thousands of people are injured in fall accidents. According to statistics maintained by the Center for Disease Control, a significant percentage of these accidents result in serious injury or even death. The case we are examining in this blog post was a fall on ice.
In situations in which a person falls on someone else’s property and is injured, he or she may be able to bring a premises liability lawsuit against the owner of the property, if the landowner’s negligence contributed to the accident. If successful, the plaintiff in such a lawsuit may be able to recover medical expenses, lost wages, compensation for pain and suffering, and other damages.
When a person is injured on someone else’s property, or when a loved one dies as a result of an accident on another party’s property, there is the possibility of filing a premises liability lawsuit seeking compensation for damages such as medical expenses, lost wages, and pain and suffering.
However, the burden is on the plaintiff to prove his or her case by a preponderance of the evidence. Business and landowners are very resistant to a finding of liability and will fight hard for a dismissal of the case if at all possible.
A negligence case has four components: duty, breach of duty, causation, and damages. Sometimes, a particular situation – such as a slip and fall injury, an act of medical malpractice, or a defective product – turns a simple negligence case into a more complex inquiry.
Sometimes, however, the opposite is true. A recent case from the Kentucky Court of Appeals illustrates this point.
Facts of the Case
In Campbell v. Pro Video Audio Productions, Inc., the plaintiff was working as a professional stagehand at a concert in Louisville in 2012 when his foot became entangled in a tarp placed on the stage. He fell approximately seven feet, hurting his arm, leg, face, and hand. He sued the defendant, who was in the business of providing stage construction and sound system services, alleging that it had created an unreasonably dangerous condition by failing to place handrails around the stage.
Kentucky Personal Injury Attorneys Blog