Due to the nature of a staircase, a personal injury lawyer needs to ask the right questions, when seeking to identify the person that should be held liable for a given stair accident.
Questions that must be answered
• Was the accident the property owner’s fault?
• Had the property owner caused a torn spot on the stairway’s carpet?
• Had the property owner allowed a certain item to remain on the staircase?
• Does the evidence indicate that the same owner should have known about the danger on the staircase, and should have fixed it?
• Had the victim been careless?
Specifications for stairways
Any outdoor stairs must prevent an excess buildup of water or ice.
A builder must follow a state’s building codes, when constructing a staircase.
—The builder should install handrails along any set of steps.
—The steps ought to be a proper height and depth.
—The height and depth ought to be consistent, throughout the entire set of steps.
Who is supposed to oversee the builders that are working on various stairways?
A city should have an inspector, someone that visits the buildings as they are constructed. Inspectors are supposed to check for adherence to the building codes. Once a building has passed on or the inspections, it should be certified by the city.
Smart dealers in business property do not purchase a building that has not received the necessary certification. If a property owner had overlooked the need to ask about a building’s certification, then that same owner could be held liable for a stair accident.
What might be the defense team’s tactics, if the visitor to a given building has been injured on the one its stairways?
The defense team might try to show that the victim/visitor had been careless. The defense team might seek proof of the fact that the victim had held onto the handrail.
The defense team’s questions might focus on the nature of the victim’s footwear on the day of the accident. That is why personal injury lawyers in Richmond Hill tell their clients to save any relevant pieces of clothing. That advice is especially helpful, if the client was injured during a slip and fall incident.
The defense team’s questions might represent an effort to show that the victim was not watching where he/she was going. Defense lawyers often do that by asking which foot the victim first put on the problem step.
Someone that had not been watching where he/she was going might not have paid attention to which foot had made the initial contact with the problem step. That is the typical thought of an attorney that is trying to place the blame on the injured victim, instead of the defendant, the property owner.