Slip and fall victims in Massachusetts are the beneficiary of new law. Massachusetts has adopted a new standard regarding premises liability law with regard to grocery stores, for example, and other self-service retailers. The Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts, the state's highest court, sitting in Boston, Massachusetts, decided Sheehan v. Roche Brothers Supermarkets, Inc., which lightens the victim's burden of proof in slip and fall cases.
In Sheehan, the plaintiff slipped on a grape inside a supermarket sustaining significant injuries that required a month of hospitalization. In reversing a decision for the defendant, the Supreme Judicial Court adopted a new approach to premises liability. Previously, Massachusetts followed the traditional approach for premises liability cases. That is, a store owner simply had to "maintain its property in a reasonably safe condition in view of all of the circumstances, including the likelihood of injury to others, the seriousness of the injury, and the burden of avoiding the risk." Thus, a store owner could only be held liable for an injury if the store owner knew or should of known of the dangerous condition and had sufficient time to fix the condition.
In deciding against this approach, however, the Court stated that stores had changed the way they do business from individualized clerk-assisted retail stores to self-service retailers. Due to this change, the Court stated that focus should be on the reasonable foreseeability of a patron's carelessness. Consequently, where a store's chosen mode of operation makes it reasonably foreseeable that a dangerous condition will occur, a store owner may be held liable for injuries if the plaintiff proves that the store owner failed to take reasonable precautions necessary to protect him or her from the foreseeable dangerous condition.
Thus, in order to prove a claim the plaintiff must do the following: (1) show the injury was attributable to a reasonably foreseeable dangerous condition on the owner's premises that is related to the owner's self-service mode of operation; (2) show the owner failed to take reasonable measures, commensurate with the risk involved, to prevent the injury; and (3) persuade a jury that the owner acted unreasonably. At the Law Office of Neil Burns, we represent clients injured in slip and fall accidents and are dedicated to protecting their rights.
