What to Do After a Slip and Fall Accident
A slip, trip, or fall accident is always unexpected. You do your best to avoid hazardous conditions, but if a property owner fails to make a repair or warn of dangerous conditions, sometimes you can’t avoid an injury. In an instant, you can find yourself on the ground, in pain, and wondering what you should do next to best protect your health and ensure a full recovery physically and financially.
This guide offers some tips on what to do if you slip, trip, or fall on someone else’s property. As with any legal case, gathering evidence is key. The more you can document at the time of the incident, the better. However, your first priority should be to tend to your injuries.
Seek Medical Help Right Away
The most important thing to do right after a slip and fall injury is to have a medical professional assess your injuries. We often want to push through injuries or avoid the doctor and potential bad news, but none of these actions are in your best interest. While it is unfortunate, you had an accident and suffered an injury, and it is critical that you get to a medical facility. There are two main reasons for this to be your first action:
· Your well-being is at stake:
If you are in serious pain or think you may have a spinal injury, do not strain yourself to get up. Back and neck injuries are easily aggravated by certain movements, and you could be risking paralysis by further jostling your spine. If needed, call an ambulance. If you can drive yourself or someone who is with you can drive you, go to the doctor as soon as possible.
Not only is it crucial that your injuries are tended to, but you may not know the extent of your injuries. For instance, what you think is an ankle sprain could be a fracture or break, or if you hit your head, you may have more than a contusion or bruise to deal with. A medical professional’s assessment is your best route to getting proper treatment and preventing further harm.
· Establishing the time of injury and extent of injury:
If you delay medical attention, the defending party may try to say that you weren’t injured at the time of the accident. Prompt diagnosis and treatment helps you establish that the incident caused your injury. Additionally, you will have an expert’s assessment of your injuries, which is needed to for you to be fully compensated.
Document the Accident
The more details you can observe and document, the better you can understand and prove why the accident happened. Your phone’s camera is a great asset for this process, as is digital or traditional notetaking.
· Report the incident — The property owner, store manager, or landlord needs to be notified. In some cases, you will be asked to fill out an incident report. Limit your account of the incident to the facts. Do not accept or assign fault. Make sure to get a copy of whatever type of report or documentation is made.
· Take pictures — Capture the scene of the incident, including the location where you fell and the surrounding area. Photograph any dangerous conditions, such as broken tiles, puddles, ice, or a missing handrail on a staircase. If possible, get a picture of yourself to document what you were wearing, including your shoes.
· Get information from witnesses — If there are witnesses, do your best to get their names, phone numbers, email addresses, physical addresses, and their accounts of the incident.
· Take notes — Log the date and exact time of your fall. While the incident is fresh in your mind, write down what happened. Include what you were doing before you fell, how you fell, how you landed, and anything else you observed or experienced.
Contact a Slip and Fall Lawyer
Having an experienced New York slip and fall attorney on your side can be a major advantage to securing fair compensation for your injuries. A lawyer with slip and fall case experience can assess the event and let you know how to proceed. He or she will also handle the paperwork and communications needed to prepare your case.
Some people opt to negotiate a settlement without a lawyer but are often intimidated or tricked into accepting less compensation than they deserve. It is important to remember that the other party’s priority is to protect their interests, not to help you. Most likely, they have far more experience than you do at negotiating this type of case. Your lawyer will know how to best respond to their questions, what to emphasize, and when to settle or push back.
