If you have a slip-and-fall accident in Fort Lauderdale, there are a lot of factors that you have to take into consideration. Talking to a lawyer is really important because one of the things that you’ll need to know is whether the property that you slipped and fell on is public property or private property. It makes a huge difference in how the case is pursued, depending upon who owns the property that you got injured on.

The next thing that’s really important is to determine what caused the fall. There’s got to be a reason why you got injured. You can’t recover for being clumsy, for example. There has to be a defect, some type of structural defect in a sidewalk, a floor, or something else that causes an injury.

It’s really important to have a lawyer evaluate it. It’s important to have pictures taken to be able to see what it was that caused the trip-and-fall accident. There are a variety of conditions that a lawyer can look at. A perfect example is someone falling down a flight of stairs. If there was no handrail close by, that might be a defective condition that a lawyer would look at and say, ‘Well, there could be some liability for whoever it is that is responsible for maintaining that staircase.

‘But that’s not something that everybody would automatically know or think of if, God forbid, they fell down a flight of stairs and got hurt.