Miami Personal Injury Attorney - Standard of Care for Invitee

Miami Injury Lawyer Justin Ziegler has had experience dealing with personal injury lawsuits involving the standard of care for invitees. Florida courts have enlarged the meaning of invitee every so often, but the standard of care has been the same.  The 2 duties of care that a property owner owes a invitee are:

a) to use reasonable care in keeping and maintaining the premises in a reasonably safe condition; and

b) to give the invitee warning of concealed risks that are known or should be known to the property owner and which are unknown to the invitee and cannot be discovered by him through the exercise of due care.

a) Duty to Use Reasonable Care to Keep and Maintain the Premises in a Reasonable Safe Condition

A landowner has the duty to protect invitees from dangerous conditions actually known to the owner or occupier and to determine that the premises are reasonably safe.  When the owner actually has knowledge of a dangerous condition, her duty to protect invitees from the danger may necessitate the owner to 1) get rid of the danger; 2) not allow invitees from the area of the danger by placing barricades, gates doors, walls, fences, etc. 3) give appropriate protective devices 4) provide warnings of the risks 5) a mixture of numbers 1-4. 

The duty to determine that the premises are reasonably safe requires the owner to use reasonable care to inspect and discover dangerous conditions that are not actually known to the owner. This may be known as constructive notice and it may be broken if the landowner does not make a reasonably diligent inspection or search at reasonable times. How does a owner know how often to inspect the premises so that this duty?  The answer depends on a number of factors such as the type of premises and the business or activity being conducted there;  potential dangers that are foreseeable; types of invitees; the methods that possible dangers could be established; and the level of the danger involved. If a sensible inspection would reveal  the danger, and if the danger was there before the injury for a time period which was greater than the time between prudent intervals, then the owner may have constructive notice of the risk and he may be responsible for injuries caused by the risk.  In Florida, constructive notice may be created by circumstantial evidence.