The Michigan premises liability law was the subject of a recent, landmark ruling by the Michigan Supreme Court.
In Kandil-Elsayed vs. F&E Oil, Inc., and Pinsky vs. Kroger Company of Michigan, the Michigan Supreme Court clarified the elements that victims will need to prove in a slip and fall lawsuit against the property owner or manager who negligently failed to protect the victim from dangerous conditions on the owner’s property.
Importantly, the court made clear that a property owner or manager who invites people onto his or her property to conduct business (such as when the property owner is a store or business and the person is a customer) has “a duty to exercise reasonable care to protect invitees from an unreasonable risk of harm caused by a dangerous condition of the land.”
And when the dangerous condition that causes a person to suffer a slip and fall injury is deemed “open and obvious” because if it is “reasonable to expect that an average person with ordinary intelligence would have discovered it upon casual inspection,” the property owner’s duty includes “anticipating the harm” that may result from the hazard and taking the necessary precautions to protect the people who have been invited onto the premises.
Although a judge will decide questions of law such as whether a duty was owed by the property owner (and if so what the duty consists of), questions of fact such as whether the duty was breached, whether the hazardous condition in question was “open and obvious,” and whether a slip and fall victim was comparatively at-fault will be argued to the jury by your premises liability lawyer.
This is an important ruling because, under a controversial decision by the Michigan Supreme Court in 2001, property owners were able to avoid being held liable for the injuries and harms they caused by arguing that the victims themselves were to blame because they should have been more careful around the “open and obvious” dangers that the property owners had allowed to exist on their premises.
In Kandil-Elsayed, the Supreme Court overruled the 2001 decision as having been “wrongly decided” and, in doing so, restored the principles of premises liability law reflected in the “decades of precedent” that existed before the 2001 decision.
Importantly, the justices in Kandil-Elsayed also addressed the duty of property owners during the winter. They clarified that property owners owe a duty to invitees on their property to take reasonable care to protect them against “the hazards of the natural accumulation of ice and snow on the property.”
The slip and fall statute of limitations continues to be 3 years.