Premises liability is not limited to specific types of injuries. Property owners or lawful occupiers can be held liable for any kind of injuries that are caused by their failure to repair a condition or warn about an unsafe condition. This applies to any dangerous condition that arises or persists because of the owners’ negligence. Such hazardous conditions could be the result of poor maintenance, uncleaned spills that create dangerous walking conditions, building code violations, broken, or uneven sidewalks or steps that create a walking hazard, or any other unsafe condition resulting from negligence by the property owner or occupier.
If such conditions result in an injury of any kind, the entity responsible for maintaining the property can be held liable. Even a negligent failure to restrain or confine a dog that results in a dog bite injury can give rise to premises liability. It is not the type of injury, but whether the cause is negligence on the part of the owner or occupier of the property that gives rise to premises liability cases.
Perhaps the common injuries in premises liability cases result from falls, usually of the slip-and-fall variety caused by hazardous floor conditions. These conditions can include broken paving tiles, broken or uneven sidewalks or pathways, uneven steps or stairs, and foreign substances on walking surfaces. In Georgia, as with most jurisdictions, these cases fall into two categories: foreign substance accidents and static defect accidents.
Foreign substance accidents. For foreign substance slip-and-fall cases, the accident is caused by something on the floor that is not usually there, such as spilled liquid, grease, or some other substance that makes it hazardous to walk on the floor in that area. The entity responsible for maintaining the property must have had actual or constructive notice that the substance was on the floor, yet still failed to correct the problem or at least put up visible warnings about the problem.
Because the property owner or occupier has a duty of reasonable inspection for such hazards, constructive knowledge can be inferred if the substance was there long enough to be discovered by a reasonable inspection or if the owner or occupier received actual complaints but had not acted on them.
Having a reasonable inspection procedure in place is a defense—if the substance was spilled or dropped on the floor very soon after an inspection and the accident occurred before the next inspection would have revealed the problem, the property owner has a defense. However, if the inspection process is deemed by a court to be not reasonable—the period of time between inspections was too long, or proper procedure was not closely followed or followed at all—the defense can be overcome. Basically, a property owner cannot leave hazardous materials on the floor where people will be walking and not exercise care to clean up those hazards in a reasonable time frame.
Static defects. The other major category of slip-and-fall accidents is the static defect case. A static defect case could involve a pothole, broken paving tiles, uneven steps or curbs, or similar hazards on a walking surface that are more permanent in nature. Again, the property owner or occupier can be liable if he has actual or constructive knowledge of the defect. A structural defect that just occurred might not give rise to liability, but broken paving tiles that have been broken for weeks likely would.
