Premises liability law in the Sunshine State requires that landowners take reasonable precautions in order to protect lawful property visitors from preventable injuries. However, if you want to successfully file suit over premises liability law, you will need to do a lot more than just claim a landowner did not protect you to the degree that they should have. Unfortunately, those additional steps in the litigation process can be more time-consuming and legally complex than you might expect.
Representation from a seasoned premises liability lawyer at the Largey Law Firm could increase your chances of securing a favorable outcome from this type of claim. Before you pursue your claim, though, it is a good idea to learn about what goes into building a premises liability case in Lake County at a procedural level so you have some idea of what our attorneys would be working to establish on your behalf.
Determining the Landowner’s Duty of Care
Landowners do not owe the same legal obligations to all visitors on their land, so the first step to building a Lake County premises liability lawsuit is establishing exactly what duty of care your prospective defendant owed you. Generally, all landowners have a duty to warn lawful visitors about known property hazards and fix or cordon off those hazards quickly after discovering them, but if you are an invitee visiting for the landowner’s financial benefit, they may also owe you a duty to inspect their property regularly for new hazards they have not discovered yet.
Establishing Knowledge of a Hazard and Lawful Presence
In the process of determining duty of care, you will also need to establish whether the defendant had active knowledge, which is direct awareness that a hazard existed, or constructive knowledge—a reasonable expectation that they should have been aware of a hazard’s existence—of a dangerous property condition, since only invitees can sue over hazards a landowner only had constructive knowledge of. When building your Lake County premises liability case, you may also need proof that you were on the defendant’s land lawfully at the time of your accident.
How Do You Connect a Breach of Duty to Specific Injuries?
Even if a landowner did have direct knowledge of the hazard they failed to address or warn you about, you can only sue them for injuries you sustained directly due to your lack of warning about that hazard. Moreover, you must have at least one injury serious enough to need some kind of professional medical care in order to have grounds to sue in the first place. This is important to consider when building your Lake County premises liability case.
Naming and Valuing Compensable Damages
Finally, a major component of the case-building process for Lake County premises liability claims is identifying specific economic and non-economic losses you have suffered from your injuries and assigning a fair financial value to them. Depending on the circumstances, you may need to estimate the value of certain future losses months, years, or even decades in advance of when they will fully manifest, since there are strict filing deadlines for starting this type of case.
Contact a Lake County Attorney About Building a Premises Liability Case
You should now have a general idea of what the process of building a premises liability case in Lake County looks like. The next step is to determine how you will enforce your right to civil recovery after being hurt through a landowner’s negligence—and, perhaps even more importantly, whose help you will enlist to do so.
Our premises liability lawyers have years of experience helping people much like you get the compensation they deserve. An attorney from our firm could handle your case personally from beginning to end in order to ensure you get the best possible outcome. Contact Largey Law Firm today to discuss your options.
