Slip and fall injuries on icy sidewalks are very common but painful and may occur throughout many areas of a city. When they occur in front of a business, the injured party may be open to lawsuits for compensation from that business. However, they'll need a good personal injury lawyer to protect them from potential defenses that may come from the business attempting to avoid lawsuit claims.

Slip and Fall Injuries on Ice Are Common

Icy days are always a difficult weather element for many people to handle, particularly businesses with open sidewalks where many customers may walk. While these businesses may believe or hope that the sidewalk is handled by the city government, they have a duty to remove ice in and around their business area. Doing so protects their customers and prevents slips and falls from impacting them.

If they do not take these steps and someone slips, falls, and injures themselves, there's a good chance that a lawsuit is going to occur. Those pursuing this lawsuit have the right to pursue it because they were not fully protected by the business and deserve compensation. However, the business may attempt many questionable defenses that make a personal injury lawyer critical for the injured party to hire.

Defenses to Anticipate

The defendant's lawyer may concoct a defense known as "assumption of risk" for their case, a common but somewhat hard defense to prove. It states that the plaintiff assumed a certain level of risk when they went out on an icy day. As a result, the defendant claims that they cannot be blamed because the conditions were icy all over the city and that the plaintiff assumed a potential slip and fall injury.

Thankfully, a good personal injury lawyer can break through this type of defense by pointing out steps that other nearby businesses may have taken to protect the sidewalk. For example, if there was only ice in front of the company where the slip and fall occurred, they can argue that this business did not provide due diligence to its customers by removing this ice, as all other businesses near them had done.

In other cases, the defense may try to claim other types of defenses, such as comparative negligence, meaning that the plaintiff was walking too fast for the conditions. Such claims are somewhat silly but are often designed to delay a case and drag it out, tempting the plaintiff to take a much lower settlement. However, their personal injury lawyer can help out by making a bigger claim easier to win. Contact a personal injury lawyer for more information.