Premises Liability Attorneys in Columbia, SC

It is the responsibility of South Carolina property owners and caretakers to maintain a premises that is safe and free of hazards for visitors and guests. This is true whether it is a government building or public park, commercial space, or private property. Failure to do so can result in accidents that cause serious injuries and in the worst cases, fatalities.

If you or someone close to you got hurt because of the negligence of a property owner, you have a right to be compensated. But property owners and their insurance companies usually fight hard against premises liability claims, often arguing that they are either frivolous and/or the fault of the injured party. To prevail with this type of claim, you will need to act quickly to put together a rock-solid case, and the first step is to get in touch with a skilled and knowledgeable personal injury attorney.

At Peake & Fowler, we understand that slip and fall accidents and other types of accidents that happen on other peoples’ property can sometimes be serious, and we are ready to fight for the full and fair compensation you deserve. Our lawyers have over six decades of combined experience representing personal injury victims in South Carolina, and we have a proven track record of success even in the most complicated cases. We know the common tactics that the other side will use to try to avoid responsibility for your premises liability injury, and we will do everything possible to help you recover maximum compensation.

Common Causes for Premises Liability Actions in South Carolina

Injuries can happen pretty much anywhere as you go about your daily life. However, there are some places in which the risks of injuries are more serious than others. These may include shopping centers, hotels and resorts, swimming pools, playgrounds, parks, schools, daycare centers, hospitals, office buildings, and nursing homes.

Premises liability is a branch of personal injury law that addresses the legal responsibility of property owners and occupiers when visitors are harmed due to dangerous conditions on the land or in the building. In South Carolina, the foundation of any premises liability action rests on the concept of the duty of care—the obligation a property owner owes to safeguard visitors against unreasonable risks of harm. Crucially, the level of care required changes dramatically based on the legal status of the person entering the property.

The Foundation of Duty: Visitor Classifications

South Carolina law recognizes three primary classifications for visitors, each dictating a different standard for the property owner’s responsibility:

1. Invitees: These are individuals who enter the property with the owner’s permission for the mutual benefit of both parties, such as customers in a retail store, patrons in a restaurant, or guests in a hotel. 

Because the owner stands to gain financially or otherwise, they owe the highest duty of care. This duty requires the property owner to conduct reasonable inspections of the premises to discover hidden dangers, repair any hazards found, and warn the invitee about any dangers that cannot be immediately rectified.

1. Licensees: These individuals enter the property with permission but primarily for their own benefit, such as social guests visiting a home, or someone stopping by to ask for directions. The owner is not required to actively inspect the property for unknown dangers. The duty owed to a licensee is to warn them of any known, non-obvious dangers on the premises.
2. Trespassers: These individuals enter the property without any permission or legal right. Generally, property owners owe no duty of care to adult trespassers except to refrain from willfully or wantonly causing them injury. An important exception exists for children, where the “attractive nuisance” doctrine may apply to dangerous conditions that might lure a child onto the property, such as swimming pools or construction sites.

The following conditions represent common examples of the property owner failing to meet the appropriate duty of care, often leading to premises liability claims.

Hazards Related to Poor Maintenance and Structure

Common causes for slips, trips, and falls and other types of injuries on properties often stem from routine maintenance failures or code deficiencies:

Wet and Slippery Surfaces: This is perhaps the most frequent cause of premises liability actions, commonly referred to as “slip and fall” incidents. These occur in retail stores or grocery shops where spills are not promptly cleaned, leaks from refrigeration units are ignored, or rainwater is tracked in without cautionary signs or mats. For an invitee to prevail, they must demonstrate that the owner or their staff either created the slippery condition, or had actual or constructive notice of the hazard and failed to act within a reasonable timeframe.

Cracked or Uneven Pavement: Trips often occur due to defects in exterior walking surfaces like parking lots, sidewalks, and entryways. Cracked asphalt, potholes, buckling concrete slabs, or hidden curbs can all create conditions where a visitor’s natural gait is interrupted, leading to a fall. This is particularly prevalent in large retail plazas or apartment complexes where owners fail to establish and follow a routine schedule for inspection and repair of common areas.

Defective Elevators and Escalators: These pieces of equipment are complex and require rigorous, scheduled maintenance. When they malfunction, the results can be catastrophic. Liability can arise from a failure to perform mandatory inspections, poorly maintained moving parts that cause sudden stops or jolts, or mechanical failures that lead to falls or entrapment.

Loose or Broken Stairwells and Missing or Damaged Railings: Staircases are inherently high-risk areas. Injuries often result from treads that are improperly secured, risers that are too high or too low, or a complete lack of required handrails. Building codes mandate specific requirements for railings and stairs to prevent falls, especially in multi-story residential and commercial buildings. A deviation from these safety standards can be strong evidence of a breach of duty.

Environmental and Hidden Dangers

The duty of care also extends to the ambient environment and latent conditions on the property:

Falling Objects: This category includes everything from poorly stacked merchandise in a warehouse store that topples onto a customer to structural elements like ceiling tiles, light fixtures, or façade components detaching and striking a visitor. In construction sites or industrial environments, this risk is heightened, requiring rigorous adherence to safety protocols to secure materials overhead.

Dead Trees and Branches: While seemingly natural, large trees or dead limbs located near walkways, parking areas, or children’s play zones represent an identifiable and unreasonable risk. Property owners who fail to engage in routine arboreal maintenance or disregard clear signs of disease or decay in a tree located near a traffic flow may be found negligent if a limb falls and causes injury.

Fires and Explosions: These often result from violations of fire codes, faulty wiring, inadequate maintenance of heating systems, or a lack of accessible fire suppression equipment. Property owners have a legal obligation to ensure proper fire alarms, sprinkler systems, and clearly marked, unobstructed fire exits are available. Failure to maintain these life safety features can result in severe premises liability claims.

Exposure to Toxic Substances: This involves injuries sustained due to contact with hazardous materials, mold, asbestos, lead, or improperly stored chemicals. This is a common concern in industrial facilities, older rental properties, or hospitals where cleaning agents or biohazards are involved. Liability is established if the owner failed to safely contain or mitigate the known existence of these harmful environmental contaminants.

Poor Lighting: Inadequate or missing illumination, particularly in high-traffic areas like parking garages, stairwells, and apartment hallways, transforms common obstacles into hidden dangers. Poor lighting not only prevents visitors from seeing trip hazards but also plays a critical role in another major claim type: negligent security.

The Separate Claim of Negligent Security

Negligent Security refers to a property owner’s failure to implement reasonable measures to protect customers, guests, or tenants from foreseeable criminal acts committed by third parties. This is a crucial area of premises liability in South Carolina, where the core legal question revolves around foreseeability.

The state often employs a “balancing test” to determine if the crime was foreseeable enough to create a duty for the owner to act. This test weighs the degree of foreseeability of the criminal activity against the burden of implementing security measures. If the area has a history of similar crimes (e.g., assaults in a dimly lit parking lot, break-ins at an apartment complex), the owner’s duty to provide security—such as hiring security personnel, installing working security cameras, or fixing broken access gates—becomes more rigorous. Liability may be imposed if the injury would likely have been prevented had those reasonable measures been in place.

The Role of Legal Counsel

Pursuing compensation for an injury sustained on someone else’s property can be legally complicated, as success depends heavily on proving that the owner had notice of the hazard. Claimants often benefit from consulting a legal practice that focuses on tort litigation. Attorneys who focus their practice on premises liability claims can help investigate the incident, gather crucial evidence such as surveillance footage, maintenance logs, and employee training records, and establish the appropriate legal classification for the injured party.

Legal counsel can interpret the specific duties owed in the context of South Carolina case law and effectively present the evidence needed to prove that the property owner breached that duty, resulting in the client’s harm. For individuals seeking to navigate the civil process and obtain appropriate compensation for medical bills, lost wages, and other damages, having representation from a firm well-versed in personal injury law is often a critical step.

How your Visitor Status May Affect your Premises Liability Claim

There are a lot of factors that help determine whether or not you have a viable premises liability case. Among the most important will be what type of visitor you were when you got hurt on the property. Your visitor status will fall into one of three categories:

Invitees

An invitee is someone who has explicit permission to be on the property, usually for the financial benefit of the owner or caretaker. Examples of invitees may include customers in a retail shop, hotel or resort guests, residential or commercial building tenants, long-term care facility residents, and restaurant patrons. Invitees are owed the highest duty of care, and it is the responsibility of the property owner or caretaker to take reasonable measures to ensure the safety of visitors in this category.

Licensees

A licensee is someone who still has permission to be on a property, but they generally do so for their own benefit or as a social guest. For example, a neighbor or a dinner party guest would be considered a licensee, as would an unsolicited salesperson, a building contractor who is doing work on your home, or a delivery carrier. Licensees are still owed a high duty of care, but not quite as high as an invitee. The property owner is still responsible to take reasonable steps to keep the premises safe and free of all known hazards, but they are not necessarily required to regularly inspect the property to uncover and eliminate dangerous conditions that would otherwise go undiscovered.

Trespassers

As most people are aware, trespassers are individuals who enter a property without the owner’s permission. This being the case, there is very little duty of care owed to visitors who fall into this category. The only obligation owners have with regards to trespassers is to refrain from any willful or malicious actions that may cause them harm. The one exception to this is if an owner knows that children might come onto the property. In such cases, they have a duty to take steps to prevent harm to children and/or warn them of any potential hazards.

Challenges with South Carolina Premises Liability Claims

If you were an invitee or licensee when you got hurt on someone else’s property, you might have a viable premises liability case. If you were a trespasser, however, you will unfortunately be facing an uphill battle. But even in the case of invitees and licensees, there are still going to be difficulties with successfully pursuing a claim.

As we discussed earlier, South Carolina property owners are not likely to willingly pay your premises liability claim without putting up a fight. There are a number of defenses they may assert in an attempt to avoid responsibility for your injuries. These may include:

• The dangerous condition that caused your injury was “open and obvious” to a reasonable person.
• The accident was your fault because you were not paying adequate attention to what you were doing.
• The accident happened when you were an area of the property that is restricted and/or where visitors do not usually go.
• The defendant was not aware or could not have reasonably known about the hazardous condition that caused your injury.

As soon as the injury is reported, the other side will go to work right away to craft their defense. If you want to have any hope of winning a case like this, you need to take swift action as well.

First off, obtain as much documentation as possible about the accident or event that caused the injury. Create a detailed written report while everything is fresh in your mind, or if you cannot write at the moment, use the voice recorder in your smartphone to create an audio report that you can transcribe later. In addition, take multiple photos of the accident scene that clearly show what caused your injury.

If there were any individuals who witnessed the event, make sure to get statements from them as well. Ideally, you want witnesses who are not employees and who have no vested interest in helping the defendant. Finally, get immediate medical treatment, then get in touch with an attorney at your earliest convenience.

Contact our Experienced South Carolina Premises Liability Lawyers

If you or a loved one got injured on someone else’s property, Peake & Fowler is ready to go to work for you. Call our Columbia, SC office today at 803-998-2412 or message us online to schedule a free consultation and case assessment with a member of our legal team.