Chicago, Illinois, has some of the most impressive buildings in the world, as well as other buildings that are lesser known. Those buildings are sites of bustling commerce, with everyone from billionaire CEOs to minimum wage clerks going in and out of them every day. Naturally, most of those people use the buildings’ stairs, both in entering and exiting the building and within the building. When someone slips and falls on the stairs and gets injured, there can be a premises liability case.
Many falls on stairs just result in a moment of fear and a couple of small bruises. Even in those cases, the people who fall should report the incident to the building’s management, because there may have been a cause like water on steps or steps in need of repair that can be addressed so that others won’t be endangered.
Of course, in other cases, a person can slip and fall down a full flight of stairs, crashing into concrete steps and platforms and suffering very serious injuries. In those cases, the people who fall may need substantial medical attention and the building owner may need to pay a substantial amount to cover the cost of that medical attention and to compensate for pain, suffering, and loss of wages for the person who fell as well.
Just falling down stairs may not be enough to create liability for the building owner or the person leasing the building. Typically, there needs to be some kind of dangerous condition that directly resulted in the fall. Additionally, the building owner or the person leasing the building should have known about the dangerous condition before the fall happened.
Those who control the maintenance of a building can be proactive by making sure that outside stairs don’t get wet, snowy, or icy. They can also make sure that all stairs, inside and outside, don’t have slippery surfaces for any reason, are not damaged, and don’t have loose parts.
Source: FindLaw, “Stairway to Damages: Injury Liability for Falling Down Stairs,” George Khoury, accessed Jan. 19, 2018