Money & the Law: Are you liable if someone slips and falls on your property?
It’s now the season of snow and ice, and people slipping on that snow and ice and hurting themselves.
So, let’s say it snows and you don’t shovel your driveway for a few days, and the delivery person bringing you packages slips on your driveway, falls and suffers a significant orthopedic injury (think broken hip). Are you liable to this person for damages resulting from the fall? Not surprisingly, the answer is: It depends. (We’re talking law here.)
To address this question, we must turn to a frequently amended and frequently litigated Colorado statute, containing many weasel words, known as the Premises Liability Act. This act provides as follows:
First, for the act to apply, the injury must have occurred on someone else’s property and by reason of the condition of the property, or activities conducted at or circumstances existing at the property. Then, the act places the injured party into one of three categories — trespasser, licensee or invitee — and establishes a different standard of care for each category. Invitees are given the greatest protection; trespassers the least.
A trespasser is someone on the property without the landowner’s consent. Trespassers can only recover for injuries caused by a willful or deliberate act of the landowner.
A licensee is someone on the property with the landowner’s consent but for that person’s own convenience or to advance his or her own interests. (A person whose job is delivering packages might fall into this category.) Licensees can recover if an injury is caused by a landowner’s “unreasonable failure to exercise reasonable care with respect to dangers created by the landowner of which the landowner actually knew.”
A licensee can also recover for an injury caused by the landowner’s “unreasonable failure to warn of dangers not created by the landowner which are not ordinarily present on property of the type involved and of which the landowner actually knew.” Arguably, a failure to shovel the snow for several days could constitute a danger created by the landowner and an unreasonable failure to exercise reasonable care with regard to that danger.
Finally, an invitee is someone on the property with the landowner’s consent and where the landowner has an interest in the transaction or has generally allowed the public onto the property.
A package delivery person might also fit into this category. Invitees can recover for an injury caused by the landowner’s “unreasonable failure to exercise reasonable care to protect against dangers” of which the landowner “actually knew or should have known.” (For farmers and ranchers, recovery is available only for a danger actually known; the “should have known” part is dropped.) A failure to shovel the snow for several days could arguably be an unreasonable failure to exercise reasonable care.
But now let’s assume the slip and fall occurred on the sidewalk in front of your house and not in your driveway. The sidewalk is not your property, so the Premises Liability Act doesn’t apply. However, if your house is in Colorado Springs, the city has an ordinance requiring residential property owners to clear snow and ice from a sidewalk abutting their property within 24 hours of the end of the snowfall. The ordinance says: “Owners have an affirmative duty to remove snow and ice from sidewalks adjacent to their property….” And it says the owner of the property “shall be primarily liable for any injury proximately caused by failure to comply with this Code.”
Perhaps the most important thing to know here is that the liability insurance part of a homeowner’s insurance policy or a renter’s policy, in the absence of an act intended to injure someone, should cover claims of liability resulting from a slip and fall.
Thus, in the event of a slip and fall injury on your property, or the sidewalk adjacent to your property, you need to notify your insurance company right away. This is where the premiums you’ve been paying all these years become useful. The insurance company will handle the claim, including hiring a lawyer if necessary, and you can go back to taking down holiday ornaments and watching football. Your duty now is to cooperate with the insurance company.
Jim Flynn is a business columnist. He is with the Colorado Springs firm Flynn & Wright. He can be contacted at moneylaw@jtflynn.com.
Money & the Law columnist Jim Flynn. THE GAZETTE FILE
