Plaintiff sued our client alleging injuries sustained from a slip and fall incident at one of its stores. Plaintiff claims that while walking towards the store’s registers, she slipped and fell on a plastic bag.
The store was equipped with video recording equipment that captured Plaintiff moments before her incident, the plastic bag’s appearance on the floor, and the incident itself. The preserved store video unequivocally showed that there was no plastic bag on the floor in the moments leading up to the incident. It revealed that a customer dropped the plastic bag onto the floor just ten seconds before the incident. The video confirmed that the store neither created the condition nor had sufficient opportunity to warn of or remove it before Plaintiff slipped. Accordingly, the store moved for summary judgment.
HM&B argued that if a premises owner has actual notice of a substance on the floor, but for too brief a period before an accident to allow for corrective measures, then there is no liability. And assuming that our client had actual notice in the first instance, a 10-second interval between knowledge and the accident is far too short to constitute a sufficient period of time to warn of or remedy the condition. As a matter of law, our client could not have been negligent for failing to address the condition during that brief 10-second period. A contrary finding would turn our client into a customer safety insurer, violating Florida law.
HM&B also argued that a period of ten minutes or less is inadequate to infer constructive notice. The definitive video evidence supported the fact that the bag was on the floor for no more than ten seconds, which is insufficient for a constructive notice finding as a matter of law.
The district court agreed and entered summary judgment for our client. The court found that our client did not have actual or constructive notice of the alleged dangerous condition, which was a wet plastic bag on the floor near a checkout aisle of the store. Under Florida law, the condition existed for only ten seconds before the incident, which was insufficient time for our client to remediate and did not support the inference that it had constructive knowledge of the condition. Ten minutes or less is generally insufficient to establish constructive notice, while 15 to 20 minutes is sufficient. Furthermore, Plaintiff provided no evidence that slip and falls on plastic bags near the checkout aisle of our client’s store occurred regularly enough to make her accident foreseeable.
The Plaintiff claimed cervical injuries resulting in an anterior cervical discectomy and fusion surgery and over $200,000 in past medical expenses.
The attorneys responsible for securing this summary judgment victory were Schuyler Smith, Marta Golani, and Michael Dono of HM&B.