Austin Slip and Fall Lawyer

You fell in a store. Here is what the store is already doing.

You went down on a floor inside a business in Austin. Maybe it was a puddle in a grocery aisle, maybe it was the tile just inside the door of a restaurant on a rainy Saturday, maybe it was a mat that slid at a gas station on Lamar. You got up embarrassed. Somebody in a vest asked if you were okay and you said yes because that is what people say. Three days later your hip or your wrist or your back is worse, not better, and there is a voicemail on your phone from a claims adjuster who wants to ask you a few questions.

Here is what has happened since you left the building. A manager filled out an incident report the same day and sent it up. Risk management opened a file. Somebody pulled a short clip of the video and let the rest of the recording roll off the drive on its normal cycle. The sweep log for that shift went into a binder or a tablet app that keeps records for as long as company policy says and no longer. And an adjuster, who is paid to close files cheaply, started building the position they will hold from now until the day a lawsuit gets filed: nobody knew the hazard was there.

That position is not a bluff. Under Texas law it is the whole ballgame.

Call (512) 500-2810. We talk to people in English or Spanish, the consultation costs nothing, and we will tell you straight whether the case is strong, including when the answer is that it is not worth opening.

The hazard existed. That by itself is not a case.

Most people assume the fall is the case. There was water on the floor, the store owns the floor, you got hurt on the store's floor, so the store pays. That is a reasonable way to think about it and it is not how Texas premises law works.

To win a case for a fall on a business floor in Texas you have to prove the store had actual knowledge of the hazard, or constructive knowledge of it, before you fell. Actual knowledge means somebody who works there knew. A customer told an employee about the spill. A manager walked past it. The leak had been reported twice that month. Constructive knowledge means nobody actually knew, but the condition sat there long enough that a store running a reasonably careful operation would have found it.

That second one is where nearly every one of these cases lives, and it is the reason the store's whole defense is a single sentence: we did not know it was there.

You are almost certainly a customer, which in Texas means you are an invitee and you are owed the highest duty a property owner owes anyone. That classification is worth exactly one sentence here, because it is rarely the fight. The classifications and the wider rules are on our Austin premises liability page. On this page we stay inside one building, on one floor, on one question.

How long was it on the floor?

In 2002 the Texas Supreme Court decided Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. v. Reece, 81 S.W.3d 812. A customer slipped in a clear puddle near a snack bar with a self-service drink machine. A Wal-Mart employee had walked within a few feet of the spill moments before. The plaintiff argued that proximity was enough: the employee was right there, so the store should have seen it.

The court said no. Proximity alone does not charge a store with notice. There has to be evidence the condition existed for some length of time before the fall, because without what the court called temporal evidence, a jury has no way to assess what opportunity the store actually had to find the hazard and clean it up. The court left one door open. If the condition is conspicuous — a large, obvious, brightly visible mess — an employee's nearness to it can shorten the time a jury would require.

So the question that decides your case is not "was there water on the floor." It is "how long was the water on the floor before you stepped in it," and the answer has to come from evidence, not from argument.

Four years earlier the court had already closed the easiest shortcut. In Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. v. Gonzalez, 968 S.W.2d 934 (Tex. 1998), the plaintiff slipped on macaroni salad that was dirty, contaminated, and had footprints and cart tracks through it. The argument was intuitive: it looks trampled, so it had been there a while. The court held that circumstantial evidence of that kind supports equally plausible opposite inferences — the salad could have been walked through by five people in ninety seconds — and that meager circumstantial evidence is legally no evidence at all.

Read those two cases together and you get the practical rule that shapes everything we do in the first month of a store-fall case. "The liquid looked dirty" is not proof. Somebody has to produce a record, an image, or a witness that puts a clock on the hazard.

There is a route around the clock when the facts support it. In Corbin v. Safeway Stores, Inc., 648 S.W.2d 292 (Tex. 1983), the store displayed loose grapes in a self-service bin over a linoleum floor and knew that arrangement dropped fruit onto the tile. The court held that a store's knowledge that its own method of display or operation creates an unreasonable risk can supply notice on its own, without proving how long any particular grape had been down. That is why we ask, early, whether the hazard came from something the store chose to do — a self-serve drink station near a carpeted transition, a produce misting system, an ice machine customers reach into, a rotisserie case that drips, a beverage cooler with a known condensation problem. When the answer is yes, the case stops depending on a stopwatch.

Sweep logs, inspection schedules and what discovery can reach

Every large retailer in Texas runs some version of a sweep program. Employees are supposed to walk an assigned zone on an assigned interval, look for hazards, and record that they did it. The record might be a paper sheet on a clipboard by the time clock, initialed each hour. It might be a handheld scanner that pings a barcode sticker at the end of each aisle. It might be a task in a workforce app that logs a timestamp and an employee ID.

That record is the clock. It is also the single most useful document in the case, and you cannot get it by asking nicely.

Once suit is filed, we serve requests for production that ask for the sweep or inspection records for that store, that department, and that shift, plus a window on either side of it. We ask for the written policy that sets the sweep interval, because a store that promises a fifteen-minute sweep and produces a log with a two-hour gap has handed you your temporal evidence. We ask for prior incident reports at the same location for the same type of hazard, which speak to whether the store knew this floor had a problem. We ask for maintenance and repair tickets for the cooler, the roof, the ice machine, or the door mat. We ask for the training materials that tell employees what to do when they see a spill. And we take the deposition of the person who signed the log, because a log with initials on it and an employee who admits she initialed the whole shift at the end of the night is worth more than the log by itself.

None of that is exotic. It is the ordinary work of a premises case, and it is the reason a store fall is not a claim you settle over the phone in week two.

Public records help around the edges. Austin Public Health publishes food-establishment inspection scores on the City's open data portal, and as of our pull on 2026-09-05 that dataset held 20,964 inspection records with inspection dates running from 2023-06-16 through 2026-05-22. We are not going to name a business here, and an inspection score is not proof that anyone fell. The point is narrower and it matters: a restaurant's regulatory history is public, discoverable, and sitting in a database, which is a very different situation from the one the adjuster describes when they tell you it is your word against the store's.

The camera footage disappears in about two weeks

Most retail camera systems in Austin write to a local recorder that overwrites itself on a loop. Fourteen days is common. Thirty is common. Some small businesses run seven. Nobody at the store is going to preserve the whole day for you out of courtesy, and in most cases nobody is required to until they are told.

This is where Brookshire Brothers, Ltd. v. Aldridge, 438 S.W.3d 9 (Tex. 2014), decides the outcome. A customer fell in a Brookshire Brothers store. The store saved about eight minutes of video around the fall and let the rest roll off. The plaintiff wanted the jury instructed that it could presume the lost footage would have hurt the store. The Texas Supreme Court refused. A spoliation instruction, the court held, is available only when the party destroyed evidence with intent to conceal it, or destroyed it negligently in a way that irreparably deprives the other side of any meaningful ability to present a claim. Brookshire Brothers had not been asked to keep more, and letting a routine overwrite cycle run was not concealment.

In plain English: if you do nothing and the video erases itself on schedule, that is your problem, not the store's.

Which is why a written preservation letter goes out in the first days, not the first month, and why the letter has to be specific enough to matter. A letter that says "please preserve all evidence" gives the store room to argue it did not know what you wanted. A letter that does the job identifies the store number and address, the date and the time window, the specific camera views by location — the aisle, the entry vestibule, the register bank facing the aisle, the exterior lot camera that shows what the weather was doing — and asks for a continuous block on either side of the fall rather than the clip the store already pulled. It asks for the sweep or inspection log for that shift, the incident report, the employee schedule, and any photographs an employee took on a phone. It says, in writing, that the store is now on notice that this material is relevant, which is the fact that converts a routine overwrite into a decision.

We send that letter. If you called us the week you fell, it goes out that week.

The incident report, and what to do before you leave the building

The manager's incident report is the store's first draft of your case, written by the store, usually within an hour, sometimes with your own words in it and sometimes with a line about what you were wearing or where you were looking.

You will not get a copy of it at the counter. Ask anyway, and note the refusal. What you can do, if you are reading this while you are still in the building or in the parking lot, is take three minutes and change the entire evidentiary picture.

Photograph the hazard itself before anybody cleans it, wide enough to show where it sits in the aisle and close enough to show what it is. Photograph the floor from standing height and again from low down, because sheen and reflection read differently at different angles and a wet floor can be nearly invisible from above. Photograph the area for twenty feet in every direction so the question of whether a warning cone existed is answered by an image instead of by two people remembering differently a year later. Photograph the ceiling and the nearest cooler or dispenser, because the source of a leak is often visible above the puddle. Photograph your own shoes. Shoot a slow ten-second video panning the scene, which captures the whole environment in a way a still frame does not. Look up and photograph the camera domes so we know which views to demand. Get the name of the manager and the names of any employees who came over. If another customer stopped, get a phone number. A first name alone will not find that person a year later. Keep the shoes and the clothes you were wearing, unwashed, in a bag.

Then decide about the ambulance honestly. Adrenaline is a real thing and it wears off around hour six. If you decline transport and go home to lie down, get evaluated the same day or the next morning at an urgent care or an ER. A gap between the fall and the first medical record is the second-most-common thing an adjuster uses against you, and it is entirely avoidable.

The adjuster who calls in the first 48 hours

Large retailers self-insure the first layer of these claims and route them to a third-party administrator. The call comes fast, it is friendly, and it usually asks for two things: a recorded statement and a signed medical authorization.

The recorded statement is not a formality. It is taken before you have seen a doctor for the full workup, before an MRI, before anyone knows whether the wrist is a sprain or a scaphoid fracture. You will be asked how you are feeling and you will say "sore," and that word will be read back to a jury. You will be asked what you were doing right before, and whatever you say becomes the first version of the story, locked in, while the store's version is still being drafted by people with counsel.

The broad medical authorization is worse. It is often written to reach your entire medical history rather than the body parts you injured, which hands the adjuster every prior back complaint you have ever mentioned to a primary care doctor. There is a narrower authorization that gives them what they are actually entitled to.

You do not have to give a recorded statement to the store's adjuster. You are not required to sign their form. Saying "I am not going to do a statement today" is a complete sentence, and it is not an admission of anything.

An early offer arrives in some of these cases, usually a few hundred to a few thousand dollars, sometimes framed as covering the ER visit. Take it and the claim is closed permanently, including for the surgery you have not been told you need yet.

Wet floors, spills, ice at the door, uneven thresholds, loose mats

The notice analysis changes shape depending on what you slipped on, so it is worth knowing which one you have.

A customer spill in an aisle is the hardest and the most common. The store did not create it, so the case turns entirely on the clock and on the sweep log. Time is everything.

A store-created spill is different. A leaking cooler, an overflowing drain, a rotisserie case that drips, a mop bucket left mid-aisle, a floor freshly waxed on a Sunday night. When the store made the condition, you are not proving that it should have discovered a stranger's mess. You are proving it knew about its own.

Rainwater at the entrance is an Austin specialty. Tile inside a vestibule, a downpour outside, hundreds of wet shoes, and a mat that is either absent, too short, or bunched. Texas stores are not liable simply because it rained, and the fact that water tracks in during a storm is something courts have treated as generally known. The cases that work are the ones where the store's own system failed: a mat program that was not deployed, a runner that ended four feet short of where people actually walk, a door that funnels water onto polished tile with nothing under it.

A loose or curled mat is a case about maintenance, not about spills. Mats have service lives. Rubber backing curls. A mat that has been photographed curling for months is a mat the store had every opportunity to replace.

An uneven threshold, a broken tile, a lip at a door track is the strongest notice posture there is, because a permanent condition does not need a clock. A quarter-inch lip that has been there since the remodel has been there for every inspection the store ever ran. What the store argues instead is that the condition was open and obvious, which moves the fight to comparative fault.

A polished floor with the wrong coefficient of friction is the one case on this list that usually needs an expert. A floor that meets no recognized slip-resistance standard, in a place where water is expected, is a design and maintenance failure that gets measured with a tribometer rather than argued about.

Falls after 65: hip fractures and what they actually cost a family

There is a version of this page that treats every fall the same. That version is wrong, and the reason is in the federal data.

A fall that leaves a 30-year-old with a bruise and a bad week ends independent living for an 80-year-old. Federal injury surveillance shows the gap plainly. In the CPSC's most recent senior injury report, using the National Electronic Injury Surveillance System and averaging 2022 and 2023, 31.7 percent of emergency department visits for falls among adults 65 and older ended in a hospital admission, against 13.4 percent for adults aged 25 to 64. Adults 85 and older are 11.2 percent of the senior population and 29.0 percent of senior fall injuries.

The medical arc after a hip fracture is predictable and expensive. Ambulance. Emergency department. Imaging. Orthopedic consult. Surgery within a day or two, usually a hemiarthroplasty, a total hip replacement, or fixation with hardware. Then an inpatient rehabilitation admission or a skilled nursing facility stay, then home health, then durable medical equipment, then outpatient physical therapy that may run for months. Somewhere in that sequence a family sits down and asks whether the house still works — whether there are stairs, whether the bathroom can be modified, whether somebody has to move in, whether somebody has to quit a job.

That last part is the damages question this page cares about, and it is the one most often left out of a demand. The medical bills are the easy part; they arrive on paper. What does not arrive on paper is the value of what the fall took away. A person who was driving, shopping, cooking, and managing their own medications before the fall, and who afterward needs help with two or three activities of daily living, has suffered a loss that has a market price: home care hours, assisted living, or the wages of an adult child who cuts back to part-time to provide the care instead. Texas law lets you recover the reasonable value of household services you can no longer perform, the cost of future care, physical impairment, and the disfigurement that hardware and scarring leave behind. Those are not soft categories. They are proved with a life care plan, a treating surgeon's testimony about permanence, and where the numbers are large enough, an economist who prices the care hours out over a life expectancy.

We put that analysis in the file early on an older client, because a case valued off the hospital bill alone is a case valued at a fraction of the loss. For how the other damage categories work, see medical expenses, loss of earning capacity, disability and disfigurement, and pain and suffering.

One short note on billing, because it comes up in every hip case. Texas Civil Practice and Remedies Code § 41.0105 limits recovery of medical expenses to the amount actually paid or incurred, not the sticker price on the itemized statement. A $61,000 hospital bill that Medicare adjusted to $9,400 does not put $61,000 in front of a jury. We handle that rule in detail on our Austin spinal cord injury page; on this page you need to know only that the number that matters is the paid or incurred number, and that letting bills go to collections before anyone sorts out the liens makes the whole thing worse.

Their three arguments about why the fall was your fault

Texas runs proportionate responsibility under Chapter 33 of the Civil Practice and Remedies Code. A jury assigns each party a percentage, your recovery is reduced by yours, and under § 33.001 you recover nothing at all if your share is more than 50 percent. That single rule is the engine behind everything the defense does in a store-fall case, and after enough of them you learn that the arguments come in three flavors and only three.

One: you were on your phone. Distraction is the first thing they look for, and the video is where they look. If your head was down for the four steps before the fall, expect that clip on a loop. The answer is that a store invites customers in to look at merchandise, arranges the entire building to pull your eyes to the shelves, and cannot then be surprised that your eyes were on the shelves. The duty to keep the floor safe does not switch off because a customer behaved the way customers behave in that exact room.

Two: you were wearing the wrong shoes. Flip-flops in July. Smooth-soled dress shoes. Boots with worn tread. The implication is that a properly equipped person would have stayed upright. Texas does not have a dress code for grocery shopping. A floor that is only safe for people in work boots is not a reasonably safe floor for a business open to the public.

Three: the cone was right there. This is the strongest of the three when it is true and it collapses when it is not, so it gets tested rather than conceded. Where exactly was the cone in relation to the hazard and to your approach? Was it upstream of you or behind you? How tall, what color, against what floor? Was it there before you fell, or was it placed in the ninety seconds after, which happens more than the defense would like, and which is why the photograph you took on the floor is worth more than any argument anyone makes later? A cone at the far end of an aisle does not warn a person entering from the other end.

We do not treat comparative fault as an afterthought to be dealt with at mediation. It is the defense's main theory from day one, so it is answered from day one, with the surveillance sequence, the scene photographs, the cone's actual position, and the sweep log that shows what the store was and was not doing.

Two years on paper, two weeks in practice

Texas gives you two years from the date of the injury to file suit. That is § 16.003(a) of the Civil Practice and Remedies Code, and it applies to a store fall like it applies to everything else. The deadline that will actually decide your case is much shorter than that, because the video is gone in fourteen to thirty days and the sweep log is kept on whatever schedule the company's retention policy sets.

A fall inside a government building or on a public sidewalk is a different animal entirely. Under Tex. Civ. Prac. & Rem. Code § 101.022, a governmental unit owes an ordinary premises-defect claimant only the duty owed to a licensee, which is a lower bar than the one a grocery store faces, and § 101.101 requires written notice of the claim within six months — except that a home rule city's charter may set a shorter period, and the City of Austin's own claims page instructs you to send that letter within 45 days of the incident. Miss that window and the two-year statute never gets a chance to matter.

Falling at work

If you fell on a floor while you were on the clock, this page is not the page you need. Nationally, the Bureau of Labor Statistics counted 479,480 private-industry days-away-from-work cases caused by falls, slips and trips in its 2023–24 survey, at a rate of 22.6 per 10,000 full-time workers, with a median of 13 days away from work — against a median of 8 days for all injury events combined. Floor falls put people out of work longer than the average workplace injury, and the legal path depends entirely on one question we cannot answer from here: whether your employer carries workers' compensation or is a Texas nonsubscriber, because that single fact changes what you can recover and who you can sue. That question, and the whole workers' compensation analysis, lives on our Austin workplace injury page. We do not cover it here.

Grocery stores, restaurants, hotels and gas stations

The building changes what the evidence looks like.

Grocery stores and big-box retail run formal sweep programs, keep the most records, and have the most cameras. That cuts both ways: the documentation exists, and corporate risk management knows exactly how to handle a claim. These are the cases where the log and the video decide everything, and where getting the preservation letter out early is worth more than anything that happens later.

Restaurants have fewer cameras and shorter retention, and the hazards cluster in known places — the path from the kitchen to the dining room, the drink station, the tile-to-carpet transition at the host stand, the step down to a patio. Staffing records and the health inspection history become more important because the video often is not there.

Hotels produce a different document set: housekeeping schedules, engineering work orders, pool-deck and lobby maintenance logs, and a night audit that timestamps who was working. Lobby marble in a rainstorm and a bathtub with no bar are the recurring patterns.

Gas stations and convenience stores are usually franchised, which means the first real question is who actually controlled the premises — the brand, the franchisee, or a separate property owner — and the answer is in the franchise and lease documents rather than on the sign out front. Fuel islands, ice merchandisers, and a single overworked clerk with no sweep program are the usual facts.

Apartment common areas, parking garages, and pools are premises claims too, and they run on different rules than a retail floor. Those belong on our Austin premises liability page.

Where these numbers come from

Every figure on this page comes from a federal or municipal source we retrieved ourselves on 2026-09-05, and each one is reproducible from the dataset or the published report named below. We do not round, extrapolate, or forecast. Where a source does not publish a surveillance year next to a figure, we say so instead of guessing one.

Fall deaths, adults 65 and older, 2023 — CDC/NCHS Data Brief No. 532 (June 2025), built on the National Vital Statistics System mortality file, ICD-10 underlying cause codes W00–W19:

Within that national figure, the rate climbs steeply with age: 19.2 per 100,000 at ages 65 to 74, 74.7 at 75 to 84, and 339.5 at 85 and older. On CDC's falls data page, the age-adjusted fall death rate for adults 65 and older rose 21 percent between 2018 and 2024, from 64.7 to 78.4 per 100,000.

How common falls are — CDC reports that over 14 million older adults, about 1 in 4, report falling every year, drawn from the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System. Roughly 37 percent of those who fall report an injury that required medical treatment or restricted activity for at least a day, an estimated nine million fall injuries, from the 2020–2021 survey. CDC's Facts About Falls page states that nearly 319,000 older people are hospitalized for hip fractures each year; CDC does not attach a surveillance year to that line, so neither do we. For 2019 specifically, CDC reports that falls caused 83 percent of hip fracture deaths and 88 percent of hip fracture emergency department visits and hospitalizations.

Emergency department injuries by product — U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission, Senior Injuries and Deaths Associated with Consumer Products: 2024 Report (January 2025), using the NEISS national probability sample, annual averages for 2022–2023:

Falls account for 77 percent of all senior consumer-product injuries in that report — 2,453,500 out of 3,177,300. Adults 65 and older are 4.3 times as likely as adults 25 to 64 to be treated in an emergency department for a fall, and 9.9 times as likely for a serious one.

Cost — CDC-published research puts U.S. healthcare spending on non-fatal older adult falls at $80.0 billion in 2020, most of it paid by Medicare, up from an earlier estimate of about $50 billion in 2015 (Haddad et al., Injury Prevention, 2024).

Workplace floor falls — Bureau of Labor Statistics, Survey of Occupational Injuries and Illnesses, private industry 2023–24: 479,480 days-away-from-work cases from falls, slips and trips, rate 22.6 per 10,000 full-time workers, median 13 days away. BLS counted 2.5 million nonfatal workplace injuries and illnesses in 2024.

Austin inspection records — City of Austin Open Data Portal, Food Establishment Inspection Scores (dataset ecmv-9xxi, Austin Public Health Environmental Health Services Division). Queried 2026-09-05: 20,964 records, inspection dates 2023-06-16 through 2026-05-22, rows last updated 2026-06-15.

What is not here. No agency publishes slip-and-fall counts for Austin or Travis County, so there is no local number on this page. CDC's non-fatal fall estimates are national, which is why the Texas figure above is a death count and nothing else. The BLS event breakdown is national private industry, not Texas. Where you see a number here, it is national, it is Texas, or it is the City of Austin, and we have said which.

What we spend to build a floor case, and what it costs you

We take these on contingency. You owe no attorney's fee unless we recover money for you, and the fee percentage and the expense terms are written in the agreement you sign before we start, in English or Spanish, whichever you would rather read.

The part worth understanding is what "advancing expenses" means on a case like this one, because it is different from case to case. A floor case does not need an engineering teardown or a crash reconstruction. What it needs is paper, and paper has a price. Filing fees and service on a corporate registered agent. A court reporter and a videographer for the store manager's deposition and for the employee who signed the sweep log. Certified medical records and billing affidavits from every provider, which hospitals charge for by the page. A records subpoena when a provider will not respond to a request. On an older client with a hip fracture, a life care planner and sometimes an economist. On a polished-floor case, a slip-resistance expert with a tribometer.

We front all of it. Those costs come out of the recovery at the end, itemized, and you see the ledger.

The reason we say this out loud is that the sweep log and the video are not free to obtain and they are not optional. A store fall handled as a phone-call negotiation, with no suit filed and no discovery served, is a case where nobody ever finds out how long the water was on the floor. That is the case the adjuster is hoping you bring.

The first week after a store fall

1. Get evaluated today if you have not been. Same-day or next-day is the standard; a two-week gap is the second thing the adjuster will use against you.
2. Write down what you remember tonight — the aisle, the time on your receipt, what the floor looked like, who you spoke to, what they said. Memory degrades fast and a contemporaneous note is evidence.
3. Keep the receipt. It timestamps you inside the store to the minute, which narrows the video request to something a court will enforce.
4. Do not give a recorded statement and do not sign a blanket medical authorization until you have talked to a lawyer.
5. Get a preservation letter out this week. Fourteen days is a real deadline. After Brookshire Brothers, a routine overwrite that nobody asked the store to stop is not spoliation.
6. Keep the shoes and the clothes unwashed, in a bag, exactly as they were.
7. If it happened in a City building or on a public sidewalk, the clock is 45 days for written notice to the City of Austin, not two years.
8. Call (512) 500-2810. If we are not the right firm for it, we will say so on the first call.

What people ask after a fall in a store

The questions people ask us in the first fortnight after a fall in a business.

Related pages on this site

• The wider Texas premises liability doctrine
• You fell at work rather than as a customer
• A fall from height on a construction site
• A head injury from a fall
• Medical expenses

Talk to us about the fall

This page is general information about Texas law. It is not legal advice, and reading it does not create an attorney-client relationship. Every case turns on its own facts. Past results do not guarantee future results.