The moments immediately after you fall on someone else’s property feel disorienting and painful. Between assessing your injuries and dealing with embarrassment, taking steps to protect your legal rights probably isn’t your first thought. What you do in those first minutes and hours after falling, however, significantly affects whether you can later recover compensation for injuries caused by property owner negligence.
Our friends at Kelso Law emphasize to clients that evidence disappears quickly after falls. A slip and fall lawyer handling these cases knows that documentation collected immediately after accidents proves far more valuable than anything gathered days or weeks later when memories fade and conditions change.
Check Yourself For Injuries First
Your immediate health takes priority over everything else. Assess whether you can safely stand or whether you need to remain still until help arrives. Don’t try to walk off serious injuries out of embarrassment or to avoid making a scene.
Some injuries won’t feel severe initially due to adrenaline and shock. Broken bones, head trauma, and internal injuries sometimes don’t produce immediate pain that reflects their seriousness. If you have any doubt about injury severity, stay where you are and ask someone to call for medical assistance.
Even if injuries seem minor, you’ve still experienced trauma that warrants evaluation. Declining immediate medical attention doesn’t prevent you from seeking care later, but it does create gaps insurance companies exploit to argue injuries weren’t serious.
Report The Fall To Property Owner Or Manager
Notify the property owner, manager, or employees about your fall as soon as possible. This creates an official record that the incident occurred and puts the property owner on notice that someone was injured on their premises.
Ask that an incident report be completed. Commercial properties typically have standardized forms for documenting customer accidents. Request a copy of any report created, though some businesses refuse to provide them immediately.
Describe how you fell and what caused it, but avoid speculating about fault or making statements minimizing your injuries. Stick to factual descriptions of what happened without apologizing or accepting blame.
Document The Accident Scene With Photos
Photograph everything related to your fall if you’re physically able. Modern phones make this easy, and visual evidence proves invaluable when property owners later claim conditions were different than you remember.
What to photograph:
- The exact spot where you fell from multiple angles
- The hazard that caused your fall (spill, uneven surface, debris, etc.)
- Surrounding area showing context and sight lines
- Any warning signs or their absence
- Lighting conditions if relevant
- Your injuries if visible (torn clothing, bruises, cuts)
- Weather conditions if applicable
Take wide shots showing the overall area and close-ups capturing specific details. More photos are always better than too few.
Identify And Collect Witness Information
People who saw you fall provide independent verification of what happened. Their accounts carry more weight than your own description because they’re perceived as unbiased.
Get names and contact information from anyone who witnessed your fall. Ask if they saw the hazard before you fell or noticed property conditions that contributed to the accident. Some witnesses volunteer statements about seeing the same hazard earlier or nearly falling themselves.
Don’t wait for the property owner to collect witness information. They may not make serious efforts to identify everyone who saw what happened, especially if witness accounts support your version of events.
Preserve Physical Evidence
Keep the shoes and clothing you wore when you fell. These items sometimes show damage patterns or debris that helps prove how the accident occurred. Torn pants, scuffed shoes, or substances on clothing can all serve as evidence.
If the hazard that caused your fall was a foreign substance, try to identify what it was. Note colors, textures, and any odors. If safe and practical, photograph the substance on your shoes or clothing.
Note Exact Time And Conditions
Write down the date and time of your fall as precisely as possible. Weather conditions, lighting levels, and how busy the property was all matter for liability analysis.
If your fall occurred in a business, note what activities were happening. Was a sale in progress? Were floor cleaning or maintenance activities ongoing? Were there unusual numbers of customers creating congestion?
These contextual details help establish what property owners should have been doing to maintain safe conditions given the circumstances at the time.
Seek Medical Attention Promptly
Visit a doctor, urgent care, or emergency room as soon as reasonably possible after falling. Medical records created close to the accident date carry more weight than delayed treatment.
Describe all your symptoms to medical providers, even if some seem minor. Pain that feels insignificant initially may indicate serious underlying injuries. Medical records documenting your initial complaints become important evidence.
Follow all recommended treatment and keep all follow-up appointments. Gaps in medical care hurt your case because insurance companies argue that truly injured people seek consistent treatment.
Avoid Discussing The Fall On Social Media
Don’t post about your accident on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, or other social media platforms. Insurance companies monitor social media and use posts against injury claimants.
Photos of you engaging in activities after your fall, even innocent posts unrelated to injuries, get misconstrued as evidence you weren’t seriously hurt. Privacy settings don’t protect you because discovery rules allow access to social media content.
The safest approach is complete social media silence about your accident and injuries until your case resolves.
Do Not Sign Anything Without Legal Advice
Property owners or their insurance companies may ask you to sign documents shortly after your fall. These might be presented as routine incident reports but actually contain liability releases or settlement agreements.
Read anything carefully before signing. Better yet, don’t sign documents from property owners or insurers without first getting legal guidance. Once you sign releases, recovering compensation becomes extremely difficult or impossible.
Keep A Personal Journal
Start a written record of how your injuries affect your daily life. Note pain levels, activities you cannot do, medical appointments, and how injuries impact work and family responsibilities.
This journal serves multiple purposes. It helps you remember details that fade over time. It documents impacts that medical records might not fully capture. It provides detailed information for calculating pain and suffering damages.
Update your journal regularly while memories are fresh. Trying to reconstruct weeks or months of injury impacts after the fact produces less credible and complete records.
Return To Document The Scene Again
If possible, return to the accident location within a few days to photograph conditions again. Hazards that haven’t been fixed prove property owners weren’t diligent about maintenance. Changes to the scene might indicate the owner knew conditions were dangerous.
Visit at the same time of day and day of week as your fall to capture similar conditions. Lighting, traffic patterns, and activities may differ substantially at different times.
If the property owner has made repairs or removed hazards, photograph the changes. These modifications sometimes constitute admissions that prior conditions were dangerous.
Preserve All Related Expenses
Keep receipts and records of all accident-related expenses. Medical bills obviously matter, but also save records of transportation costs to appointments, medications, medical equipment, and any other purchases related to your injuries.
Document lost wages from missing work due to injuries or medical appointments. Get written statements from your employer confirming time missed and income lost.
These financial records prove economic damages and help calculate the total impact of your accident.
The steps you take immediately after falling on someone else’s property can make the difference between successfully recovering fair compensation and losing a valid claim to insufficient evidence. While dealing with injuries is understandably your primary concern, investing time in documentation and evidence preservation in those first hours and days protects your legal rights and strengthens any future premises liability claim you may need to pursue.