We represented a lady that was at her hardware store to pick up some supplies. While walking out of the store, she tripped on a bold that was left in the concrete after a recent renovation. Her fall led to her braking a part of her should that required her to have surgery. This San Antonio case settled quickly after filing.
Transcript:
Speaker: Welcome to Hill Law Firm cases, a podcast discussing real-world cases handled by Justin Hill in the Hill Law Firm. For confidentiality reasons, names and amounts of any settlements have been removed. However, the facts are real, and these are the cases we handle on a day-to-day basis.
We handle all types of personal injury cases here at Hill Law Firm. One of the types of cases people hear about often are slip and falls or trip and falls. They’re spoken of negatively as though somebody injured, when a property is unsafe, is somehow at fault. Sometimes they are at fault, but sometimes they’re not. The law in Texas has become so difficult that it’s very hard to prove one of those cases, and never get in front of a jury on any case like that. We don’t do a ton of premises liability cases at Hill Law Firm, but we do some of them.
One of the cases we handled was for a woman who was injured at a hardware store. The hardware store recently had a renovation. They had moved the front of the store out, they had put an even an overhang area in front of the store, they had changed a lot of the areas where people come and go to expand the size of their store. My client was at the store picking up something, when she was walking out towards her car. What she didn’t see was that when they renovated the store, they had left a bolt sticking about one inch out of the concrete. This bolt was right in the middle of the walkway, and the store had just opened up after the renovations.
The color of the bolt was almost identical to the color of the floor. My client was walking, looking at her receipt, when she kicked the bolt and fell. My client was about 65 years old and not as agile as she used to be, and she fell on her shoulder and broke her shoulder. The incident was on video, and the hardware store shaved down the bolt the next day. They admitted that they had accidentally left that bolt there. They admitted that they had created a dangerous condition for our client, that they had a duty to remove any dangerous conditions, and they had not.
Due to the trip and fall of my client in the San Antonio hardware store, she had significant medical bills. She had a surgery. I thought she was going to require a second surgery, but her first surgery and rehabilitation did the job. Luckily for her, the defendant, in this case, realized that this was a trip and fall that they were responsible for. They did the right thing, and they resolved her claim early.
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