Albuquerque Premises Liability Lawyer: When You’re Injured on Property Belonging to Another
One day you are out shopping dining, visiting friends, or working. It’s an ordinary day. Then suddenly, everything is changed. You find yourself in pain, unable to work, and with medical and other bills mounting. If you were injured because of a hazard on someone else’s property, you owe it to yourself to speak with an Albuquerque premises liability lawyer. The owner or other party in control of the property may have a legal obligation to compensate you. A premises liability attorney in Albuquerque can help you enforce that obligation to get the funds you need to get your life back on track.
Typical Premises Liability Situations
Premises injuries can happen virtually anywhere: stores, restaurants, offices, schools, factories, construction sites, apartment buildings, and private homes. Premises liability injuries can be a result of such diverse dangers as:
- Spills and slippery floors.
- Broken or uneven sidewalks.
- Missing handrails.
- Unmarked steps.
- Loose tiles or carpeting.
- Falling merchandise.
- Poor lighting.
- Inadequately fenced swimming pools.
- Unrestrained dogs.
- Collapsing decks or other structures.
- Fires and explosions.
- Exposed wires.
- Fallen trees and branches.
- Unfenced or unmarked construction areas.
- And many others.
Perhaps the most common premises liability situation occurs when a customer at a store slips or trips and falls. However, premises liability cases also arise in a broad variety of unique situations and settings: a restaurant patron cracks her skull on a low mounted shelf when rising from her chair; an air conditioning repairman falls through a false floor while trying to reach the air conditioning unit; a worker is electrocuted when replacing a sign on a billboard erected too close to power lines. The potential scenarios are endless.
Premises Liability Law in New Mexico
A landowner or occupier doesn’t guarantee the safety of people who enter the premises. It will take more to win your case than the mere fact that you were injured on someone else’s property.
New Mexico premises liability law can be complex and the outcome of the case dependent on the details. A landowner or occupier has a legal duty to keep property in a reasonably safe condition in view of the circumstances. The greater the foreseeable risk of injury to someone who comes on the property, the greater the care the owner or occupier must take.
Liability for an injury will be imposed only if the owner or occupier knew about the dangerous condition or should have known about it (which is called “constructive” knowledge) and had sufficient time to fix it.
It’s up to the injured person to prove each of these elements: (1) actual or constructive knowledge of the condition; (2) an opportunity to fix it; (3) a reasonable person in the same circumstances would have fixed it.
Another complexity in these types of cases is that they can involve multiple defendants, such as the property owner, tenants, management companies, contractors, subcontractors, and public utilities, for example.
You can expect these parties and their insurance companies to put up a fight. The will try to point the finger at each other as well as at you. They will claim: the accident was entirely your fault because the hazard was obvious and you should have been able to avoid it; or, the accident was a fluke that no one could have foreseen; or, the hazard was too expensive or impossible to remove. Yet, sometimes all that would have been required to prevent the injury is a simple sign or fence.
Call a Premises Liability Attorney in Albuquerque
Premises liability cases can be difficult to prove. Success often depends on getting a qualified lawyer involved soon after the accident to investigate the scene, identify all the witnesses and possible defendants, and preserve evidence. To talk your case over with a knowledgeable and trustworthy Albuquerque premises liability lawyer, call Salim Khayoumi at (505) 333-8613.
