Santa Monica Premises Liability Lawyer

Duty of Care

The highest duty of care is owed to customers. A supermarket has a duty to regularly inspect its floors for pools of water or objects fallen from shelves. Once a danger is spotted, the supermarket must fix the matter immediately and post warnings in the meantime. There is also a duty to provide security including proper lighting in parking lots.

Common examples of how duty of care applies to different visitors include:

• Paying customers are entitled to regular inspections of aisles, entrances, restrooms, and parking lots so that spills, debris, or broken fixtures are identified and corrected before someone is hurt.
• Social guests should be warned about known dangers such as loose handrails, uneven steps, or recently mopped floors, and homeowners are expected to make reasonable repairs when they know about a hazard.
• Workers and contractors who come onto the property to perform services must also be protected from unsafe conditions that the owner knows about or should discover with reasonable inspections.
• Children attracted to features like swimming pools, trampolines, or play structures often trigger additional safety measures, such as fencing or covers, because of the risk that they may wander onto the property.

A guest in a home is also owed a duty of care by the owner. Uneven stair steps need to be fixed to avoid slips and falls. Dog bites from one's dog must be prevented. Even trespassers are owed a duty of care. A homeowner must guard against swimming pool accidents by fencing off or covering pools to secure from neighboring children.

Common Premises Liability Incidents in Santa Monica

People are injured on unsafe property in many different ways, and the facts of each incident will shape how a claim is evaluated. In Santa Monica, premises cases often arise from falls on wet or uneven surfaces in grocery stores and restaurants, tripping hazards on cracked sidewalks near busy commercial areas, or injuries in beachfront businesses that see heavy foot traffic. There can also be claims involving defective handrails in older apartment buildings, inadequate security in parking garages, or unsafe conditions in short-term rentals near the ocean. Understanding how and where the event happened helps a premises liability attorney Santa Monica residents consult identify who may be responsible and what safety rules should have been followed.

Premises Liability Attorney in Santa Monica

At McGee Lerer Ogrin, we defend the rights of clients injured on others' property in Santa Monica. We are a husband and wife firm with decades of combined experience. We focus our practice on serious injury and death cases. We pick and choose the cases we take on in order to be able to provide personalized service to every client. Our practice has flourished with the help of referrals from prior clients and from other attorneys familiar with our reputation in the legal community.

We encourage you to contact us to discuss your case. If you need help finding a doctor, we can arrange for excellent local physicians to provide medical care, and who will wait to be paid until your case resolves. If you have already hired a lawyer, but are unhappy with your current lawyer, we can give a free second opinion. If you hire our firm, we charge no upfront fees and no fee whatsoever unless you win.