Falling in a shop is not a case. Proving the shop knew about the hazard is. Jose Robles Jr is an Air Force combat veteran who builds these claims around the records that show what a property owner knew and when, for people hurt across Richardson and Dallas County.
A Richardson premises liability lawyer proves that a property owner knew about a dangerous condition, or should have, and did nothing about it. Texas requires four things: knowledge, real danger, failure to act reasonably, and that this caused the injury. The camera footage that proves the first one is often recorded over within days.
Four things, and the first one ends most cases before the others matter.
This is the framework Texas applies when a customer or a tenant is hurt by the condition of a property. Its courts have used it consistently for decades.
The four things Texas requires an injured customer or tenant to prove.
1 • The owner knew, or should have
They knew about the hazard, or it had been there long enough that a reasonable check would have found it. This is where most cases are won or lost.
2 • It was genuinely dangerous
The condition posed a real risk, not the ordinary hazard of walking around in the world.
3 • They did not act reasonably
They failed to clean it, fix it, block it off or warn anyone about it.
4 • That failure caused the injury
The hazard is what actually hurt you.
Read the first one again, because it is the one that ends cases. It is not enough that you fell, and it is not enough that a hazard was there. The question is whether the owner knew, or whether it had sat there long enough that a proper check would have found it. A spill three minutes old and the identical spill an hour later are legally different situations.
That is why the fight is usually about how long, and why the evidence that settles it, meaning cleaning logs, inspection schedules, staff accounts and camera footage, has to be secured before it is routinely destroyed.
More than almost anything else. Texas sorts visitors into three groups, and what the owner owed you depends entirely on which one you were in.
A customer or a tenant
Somebody on the property for the owner's benefit: shopping, dining, staying at a hotel, or living there and using the shared areas. They are owed the most protection, including a duty to actually look for hazards the owner does not yet know about.
A social guest
Somebody there with permission but for their own reasons. The owner must not hurt them deliberately and must warn about dangers the owner actually knows about, but is not required to go looking.
Somebody with no permission
Owed very little: essentially not to be hurt deliberately or through gross carelessness. There are narrow exceptions where children are involved.
Most claims that reach a lawyer involve the first group, because that covers anyone shopping, eating, staying or renting. It is also the only group property owners have to actively look out for, which means a business cannot avoid responsibility simply by never checking.
Experience matters here more than in most claims. A team that has run slip and fall cases before knows which conditions the defence will call obvious, and obtains the records that answer it before anybody asks.
Expect the defence to argue about which group you were in anyway. A guest who wandered into a staff-only area, or a tenant hurt somewhere outside the shared areas, will be recharacterised if the facts allow it, because what is owed to a social guest is far narrower.
Retail and grocery floors, apartment complexes, restaurants, office parks and car parks, with a different hazard typical of each.
Shops and supermarkets. Spills, produce debris, rainwater tracked in at the doors, and stock stacked so it falls. Chains usually keep cleaning logs, which are excellent evidence when they exist and very telling evidence when they do not.
Apartment complexes. Broken stair treads, unlit walkways, failing handrails, pool areas without proper fencing, and claims arising from assaults where security was inadequate. These turn on maintenance request histories, which often show the same complaint filed over and over.
Restaurants and retail around CityLine and Restaurant Park. Wet tile near entrances and toilets, poorly marked steps, and uneven joins between surfaces. Richardson has added a lot of newer mixed-use development, and newer does not mean safer.
Office parks and car parks. The Telecom Corridor means large employers with large car parks: potholes, wheel stops in walking routes, missing lighting, and drainage that ices over in a rare freeze. Ownership here is often split between a landlord and a management company, so working out who actually controlled the area is part of the job.
Because it is usually the only objective proof of how long the hazard had been there, and it is routinely recorded over within days or weeks.
Most commercial camera systems run on a loop. Depending on the property, the retention window can be as short as a few days. Nothing obliges a business to keep footage simply because somebody fell, and nothing stops that loop running while an injured person waits to see whether their back settles down.
A written demand changes that. Once an owner has been told in writing that specific footage matters to a claim, destroying it stops being routine record-keeping, and a court can tell a jury what the missing footage would probably have shown. Sending that demand is one of the first things done on these cases, and it is the step that cannot be recovered later.
Incident reports matter for the same reason. If a manager filled one in on the day, it exists somewhere. If nobody did, that absence says something in itself about how the property handles hazards.
Who pays is a separate question from who was negligent. Commercial properties and management companies carry liability insurance, and it is that insurer, not the store manager, deciding what to offer. Clients are often relieved to hear that; the results they care about come from the policy, not from a person they see every week.
If you fell weeks ago and no report was ever made, the claim is not automatically lost. It has to be built from what remains, which is ordinary work rather than a reason to give up.
You talk to the lawyer handling your case, not a rotating queue of case managers. On a claim decided by what got preserved in week one, that matters.
Jose Robles Jr is a decorated Air Force combat veteran with a 95% success rate, $5M+ recovered, 1,000+ cases handled, and a 4.9 star Google rating.
Before becoming a personal injury lawyer, Jose "Joe" Robles Jr served nearly 15 years as an Air Force Military Police officer, including four combat tours in the Middle East, and earned his law degree from Texas A&M University School of Law. He then spent four years at Bailey & Galyen, rising to Managing Attorney of the Pre-Litigation Personal Injury Department, before founding this firm.
These cases reward speed and paperwork rather than volume, which suits a practice built to move on a file in the first week instead of the first quarter.
We also handle dog bite claims and car accident claims in Richardson. For everything the firm does here, see our Richardson personal injury page.
A customer or tenant has to prove four things. First, that the property owner knew about the dangerous condition or that it had been there long enough that a reasonable check would have caught it. Second, that it was genuinely dangerous rather than an ordinary hazard of daily life. Third, that the owner did not take reasonable steps to fix it, block it off or warn about it. Fourth, that this is what caused the injury. The first one decides most cases.
Harder than most people expect, and the reason is that first element. It is not enough that you fell, and it is not enough that a hazard existed. You have to show the owner knew about it, or that it had sat there long enough that anyone checking properly would have found it. A spill three minutes old and the same spill an hour old are completely different cases. That is why the evidence gathered in the first days, especially camera footage and cleaning logs, so often decides the outcome.
A lawyer who handles injuries caused by the condition of somebody else's property rather than by a vehicle or a product. The work is mostly about proving what the owner knew and when, which means getting hold of incident reports, cleaning and inspection logs, maintenance records, earlier complaints about the same hazard, and camera footage before it is recycled. Falls, poor security, falling stock, unsafe stairs and bad lighting all fall under it.
Yes, it is a form of carelessness, but Texas treats it as its own distinct claim with its own elements, and that distinction matters procedurally. A claim about a dangerous condition of the property is a premises claim. A claim about something an employee was actively doing that hurt somebody is a different claim. Courts have warned about mixing them up, and pleading the wrong one can sink a case that was otherwise sound.
Generally two years from the date you were hurt. The practical deadline is far shorter. Camera systems at most Richardson shops and complexes record over themselves on a cycle measured in days or weeks, and once that footage is gone, proving how long the hazard had been there becomes very hard. A written demand to preserve it, sent early, is often the difference between a provable case and a disputed one.
You can still recover as long as you were not more than half to blame, and below that line your compensation is reduced by your share rather than wiped out. Expect the property owner to argue that the hazard was obvious, that you should have seen it, or that you were looking at your phone. Those arguments are aimed squarely at that halfway line, which is why what you say in the first phone call matters.
Sometimes. A poor security claim argues that the owner knew there was a foreseeable risk of crime on the property and did not take reasonable precautions: working locks, adequate lighting, functioning gates, or security staff. Whether it was foreseeable usually rests on the property's own incident history and the surrounding area. These cases live or die on documents, so they are very time sensitive.
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