Cohen & Cohen Case Study: Miami

If you’ve recently been in an auto accident in Miami, you may be looking for a personal injury attorney in the South Florida area to represent your case. But before hiring any law firm too quickly, you should be confident that the one you’ve chosen has represented cases just like yours to get the rightful settlements deserved.

Our attorneys at The Law Firm of Cohen & Cohen have helped victims with a variety of personal injury cases in Miami. Here is one of our recent case studies:
(Note: To protect the identities of our clients, the names have been changed, but the facts remain the same.)

Case Study: Miami

Leah (the plaintiff), a woman in her 40s, walked into a gas station on a rainy day. As she took her first step into the gas station, she immediately slipped and fell on water that was on the floor. Leah’s leg came out from underneath her, she flew up in the air and then landed directly on her back. When she landed, her head was in the open doorway of the electric doors, which then closed and hit her in the head. The gas station normally had a large mat on the floor in front of that door to soak up any water or dirt that people would track in from outside. On this particular day, for some reason, that mat was in a different area of the store in front of the soda machines.

[Side note: Florida law is tricky when it comes to slip-and-fall or trip-and-fall accidents. The law used to be that if you fell in a store, the store had to prove that they didn’t know and couldn’t have known that there was a dangerous condition existing on their premises. In 2011, the law changed so that now if you fall in a store, you (the injured party/plaintiff) have the duty to prove that the store knew or should have known that the dangerous condition existed and had sufficient time to fix it. The reason for this was there were situations where someone would spill something (in an aisle of a grocery store, for instance), and within seconds after, another customer would slip on the spilled liquid—but there is no way that Publix could have reasonably avoided that. Now, we need to prove where the substance came from and how long it was there.]

In this case, it is clear that the water came from rain being tracked into the store by the customers. It is reasonably foreseeable that if you don’t have a mat on the floor, water will accumulate and make it a dangerous condition for customers. They should have either put the mat in front of the door or put a warning sign on both sides of the door so that the customers were aware of the dangerous condition.

As a result of the fall, Leah sustained neck and back injuries. Ultimately, the main injury was a herniated disc at C5/6 which was impinging on the spinal cord. She was forced to undergo an anterior cervical discectomy and fusion at the C5-6 level. Total medical bills were approximately $180,000. After a fight on liability, the case was resolved for the policy limits of $500,000.00.

See other case studies similar to this on our website, or download our free e-book today: