You were doing something ordinary. Walking a grocery aisle, crossing a store entrance on a rainy day, reaching for something on a shelf. Your foot hit a patch of water or a dropped item you never saw, and the floor came up to meet you. Now you are hurt, and the store is already writing its version of what happened.
A claims adjuster who handles these every week will tell you the fall was your own fault, or that the store had no way to know about the spill. The store is betting you will take a small number to make the stress stop. We are built to show what your case is worth and to make the store account for a hazard it should have caught.
What the law makes you prove
A slip on a temporary substance in a store runs through Fla. Stat. 768.0755. The injured person has to show the business had actual or constructive knowledge of the dangerous condition and should have remedied it. That burden was a deliberate legislative choice: in 2010 Florida enacted section 768.0755 to place it on the injured person, undoing the more plaintiff-friendly rule the Florida Supreme Court had adopted in Owens v. Publix Supermarkets, Inc., 802 So. 2d 315 (Fla. 2001), which had shifted the burden to the store to prove it acted with care. This is the hardest burden in premises law, because the substance, by its nature, had to sit on the floor long enough to be discovered. The good news is that the proof of how long it sat there usually exists, and it sits in the store’s own records.
| Path | What it shows |
|---|---|
| Duration | The substance was on the floor long enough that a careful business would have found and cleaned it. A puddle that is dirty, tracked through, or dried at the edges helps prove time passed. |
| Regularity | The same kind of hazard happened often enough that the business should have expected it and guarded against it, which is where prior incidents at the store come in. |
Fla. Stat. 768.0755 also preserves the common-law duty of care owed by a business in control of its premises.
A slip and fall is a premises case through and through, and it is exactly the work I concentrate on as a member of the National Association of Premises Liability Attorneys with a heavy trial background. I represent injured people, not insurance companies. I am a trial lawyer who came up in the courtroom as a public defender, tried numerous cases, and cross-examined witnesses over and over, and that depth is what a serious fall case demands. Insurers pay fair value when they believe the lawyer across the table will try the case to a jury, and I am willing to do exactly that. From your first call through trial, I handle the case personally. Learn more about my background.
The race for the evidence
The defense started building its case in the minutes after you fell, using documentation systems designed to help the store and limit what you ever see. The most important piece is the surveillance video, and most systems overwrite on a short loop, so we send a demand to preserve it right away and ask for the full window before and after the fall, not just the moment you went down. That window can show how long the hazard was there and whether an employee walked past it. Alongside the video we chase the incident report, the inspection logs and sweep sheets, and the prior complaints about the same condition, because a sweep sheet that is blank, filled in after the fact, or missing entirely is its own kind of proof.
The store had rules, and the question is whether it followed them
Almost every store has written rules for cleaning, inspecting, and keeping its floors safe, because insurers push them to. When those rules exist, the case narrows to two questions: what do the rules say, and were the employees trained on them and held to them. The gap between having a safety policy and following it is often the whole case. A store cannot write itself a careful-inspection policy, ignore it, and then call your fall an unavoidable event.
Putting a number on the floor
How slippery was the floor? That is not an argument, it is a measurement. Slip resistance is expressed as a coefficient of friction, and 0.50 is the generally accepted guideline below which a walking surface is treated as unsafe. The right move in a contested case is to test the actual floor, in the condition it was in, with a calibrated instrument, because a reading under the guideline is strong evidence the surface was unreasonably dangerous. There is also a reason the fall happened where it did: people set their footing from the surface they were just on, so a floor that suddenly loses traction, such as wet tile right after an entrance mat, can drop a careful person before they react. As a forensic lawyer-scientist, this is the part of the case I build myself. More on how we prove a floor was unreasonably dangerous.
The deadline
For a fall on or after March 24, 2023, Florida gives you two years to file suit, under Fla. Stat. 95.11(5)(a). That window is shorter than it used to be, and the evidence that proves the store should have known moves faster than the legal clock. The sooner the preservation demand goes out, the more of the record survives.
Common Questions
What do I have to prove in a Florida slip-and-fall at a store?
Under Fla. Stat. 768.0755, you have to show the business had actual or constructive knowledge of the dangerous condition and should have fixed it. Actual knowledge means someone at the store knew about the spill. Constructive knowledge means the condition was there long enough, or happened often enough, that a careful business should have found it. The owner's own awareness is the heart of the fight.
How do you prove the store should have known about a spill?
Two ways. The first is duration: the substance sat there long enough that a careful business would have found it, and a puddle that is dirty, tracked through, or dried at the edges helps prove time passed. The second is regularity: the same kind of hazard happened often enough that the store should have expected it. The sweep logs, the video, and the prior complaints are where that proof lives.
The store says the spill was obvious and the fall was my fault. Is my case over?
Not necessarily. An open and obvious condition can limit a store's duty to warn, but Florida courts have held that the separate duty to keep the property reasonably safe still applies. Your own share of fault reduces what you recover, and under Fla. Stat. 768.81 a person found more than fifty percent at fault recovers nothing, so holding down that percentage is part of the work from day one.
Why does the store video matter so much?
It does three jobs at once. It can show the spill existed, it can show how long it sat there, which is the whole case on the knowledge question, and it can show whether any employee walked past the hazard and failed to clean it. Many of these systems overwrite within days, so we send a demand to preserve the footage right away. A store that lets the video disappear after that demand hands you a powerful argument.
How long do I have to file a slip-and-fall claim in Florida?
For a fall on or after March 24, 2023, you generally have two years from the date you were hurt, under Fla. Stat. 95.11(5)(a). That is shorter than the old deadline. Because the evidence that proves notice disappears quickly, it is best to talk to a lawyer well before the deadline approaches.
Related: Premises liability overview, Trip and fall cases, Personal injury overview, About Rory Safir, and Falls in a nursing home.
This page is general information about Florida premises liability law, not legal advice, and it does not create an attorney-client relationship. The governing authorities include Fla. Stat. 768.0755 (transitory foreign substances in a business), 768.81 (comparative fault), and 95.11(5)(a) (two-year limitations). Every case is different, and past results do not guarantee a similar outcome. The hiring of a lawyer is an important decision that should not be based solely on advertisements.
