I'm Griff Tonkin, and I'm one of the founding partners of the Arthofer & Tonkin Law Offices. We're a personal injury law firm. That means all we do is advocate for people who've been hurt by the negligence and mistake of others.
Today, I want to talk to you about a trip and fall incident. As I've mentioned in other videos that you may have seen on our website, trip and fall incidents often face vigorous defense from the insurance companies for the businesses or institutions where people slip or trip and fall. And the argument that's commonly made by these insurance companies is that, well, if you had just been watching where you were walking, you would not have fallen.
But that argument is very thin, and if you do a little digging, you can usually find out there's more than meets the eye to a personal injury case. In this case that I'm going to chat to you about today, we had a client who was a patron of a local restaurant, and that restaurant does not have dedicated parking in front of its location. There's some limited street parking, but they do have dedicated parking in the back of the restaurant.
Now, this restaurant is visited by patrons of all ages, and our client was an elderly lady. Well, she had met there for a family birthday, and as they left the restaurant, they moved toward the rear parking area. Despite the fact that the restaurant knew that the rear parking area was the primary parking location for all of its patrons, there was absolutely no lighting in the parking area, and the adjacent street lighting was facing into the street and away from the parking area.
As a result, the parking area was very dark. Moreover, the parking area included three different surfaces and at three different elevations. There were some areas that were concrete, there were some areas that were dirt, and there were some areas that were asphalt.
Moreover, there were various concrete elevation changes within the parking lot, including bump stops, bollards, and curbing. Well, in this case, our client was just trying to make her way to her car, and in order to do that, she had to walk through a dirt area in the dark. Well, as she did so, she caught her foot on something on the ground, fell, and actually suffered terrible injuries as a result of the fall.
What we did is we sent an investigator out to look at what caused our client to fall, and what we found surprised us. Because it wasn't just that our client had encountered a pothole or a change in the shape of the dirt walking surface, what she'd encountered was a U-shaped piece of rebar, and this was a large piece of rebar. It appeared that this rebar used to protrude vertically from the ground and anchor either a large sign or a large light post.
But during the construction of the parking lot, instead of taking what really would have been 30 seconds or so of work with someone with a grinder or a cutting torch to cut off that rebar, they simply hammered it over. When they hammered that rebar over, they left a U-shaped protrusion of rebar that would not move when somebody's foot hit it. And unfortunately for our client, her foot caught in the rebar.
She couldn't get it out from the rebar because of the shape that it had been bashed over in and left in the walking area, and she fell, injuring herself, requiring hospitalization and surgery. This was a really sad case. Our client was really terribly hurt for something that really could have been avoided with just less than a minute's worth of work that would have added exactly zero cost to the overall construction project.
Well, because we took the time to go out and see what had happened to our client precisely, learn the history of what had happened to the land where our client fell, and were able to show that this defect in the property that existed for a very long time was just simply shoddy construction work, we were able to obtain a very favorable result for our client's family in this case. If you've been injured in a trip-and-fall, or a slip-and-fall , or you'd like to work with an attorney in your personal injury matter that will vigorously advocate for you and learn the full circumstances of your case, then give us a call at the Arthofer and Tonkin Law Offices today. We're available for a free consultation on personal injury matters.
Thank you for your time
