Newport Beach Premises Liability Lawyers

Newport Beach offers locals and tourists many dining, recreation, and nightlife opportunities. When people frequent restaurants, bars, and nightclubs in the area, they want to have a good time. However, when property owners fail to properly take care of their premises, serious accidents may lead to devastating injuries.

While some premises accidents involve slip and falls, other accidents may result from negligent security on the premises and failure to repair dangerous defects.

If you or someone you love suffered injuries on someone else’s property, you may have legal options. In addition to seeking immediate medical treatment for your injuries, you should contact an experienced lawyer to help you file a claim or lawsuit against the negligent property owner.

The Newport Beach premises liability lawyers at Bentley & More LLP understand the pain, suffering, and inconvenience often accompanying premises-accident injuries. Our legal team can meet with you to discuss the circumstances surrounding your premises accident and determine if you can file a personal injury claim with the insurance company—or a lawsuit against the property owner. If you are, we can assist you with every step in the process and aggressively negotiate for favorable monetary compensation in your case.

We understand the tricks and tactics that insurance company adjusters routinely use to undervalue premises accident cases. Therefore, if the insurance company is uncooperative in your case, we can file a lawsuit in court and pursue favorable monetary damages there.

Our knowledgeable legal team has recovered millions of dollars in compensation for our accident-victim clients. Let us help you maximize your monetary recovery by filing a personal injury claim on your behalf or a lawsuit in court, seeking fair monetary damages.

For a free case evaluation and legal consultation with a Newport Beach premises liability lawyer, please call us or contact us online to learn more.

Special note for other law firms: Our legal team represents seriously injured accident victims, many of whom sustain catastrophic injuries due to others’ negligence. We also accept referrals from other law firms with those cases. Please call us and let us know if we can help with a particularly complicated or resource-intensive claim.

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What Are Some Common Premises Accidents in Newport Beach?

Premises accidents can occur on both private property and business premises, both indoors and outdoors.

Some of the most common accidents that may occur on others’ property include:

• Accidents where a defect on the floor, such as a food or liquid spill, causes an accident victim to slip, fall, and land with a significant amount of force
• Staircase accidents, where loose carpeting or flooring materials cause a property visitor to lose their balance and fall down the stairs
• Loose railing accidents, where a railing falls off or breaks, often causing the property visitor to lose their balance and fall down
• Negligent security incidents, when a property owner fails to maintain an adequate security presence on their property and a visitor suffers injuries in an assault or disturbance that someone else causes
• Sidewalk accidents, where concrete spalling or other defects cause a visitor to lose their balance and fall to the ground

If you suffered injuries on another person’s property in any of these accidents, you should understand your available legal options. The Newport Beach premises liability attorneys at Bentley & More LLP can meet with you to discuss those options and help you develop a plan of action to move your case forward.

We can help you file a claim with the negligent property owner’s insurance company, submit the necessary documentation, and start settlement negotiations on your behalf.

Legal Duties of Care Applicable to Property Owners

Premises owners owe visitors to their property a very high legal duty of care. When property owners deviate from this legal duty, and an accident occurs, the property owner or their insurance company may have to pay civil damages to compensate the accident victim for their losses.

A property owner’s legal duty of care to a property visitor depends upon the visitor’s status on the land at a particular time. In most instances, a property visitor is a business invitee. A business invitee enters another person or entity’s property for a business purpose. Patrons at a Newport Beach restaurant, bar, grocery store, or nightclub are likely business invitees if they enter the premises during business hours.

Property owners owe business invitees the highest possible legal duty of care. Specifically, they must correct, or at the very least warn about, any hazardous conditions on their property about which they know. After becoming aware of it, they must warn the property visitor within a reasonable time.

However, a property owner’s duty of care to business invitees does not stop there. Rather, a property owner has a legal duty to inspect their premises regularly to uncover potential hidden defects that might exist. If and when they become aware of a hidden defect, they have a legal duty to either correct or warn about it within a reasonable amount of time.

In contrast to business invitees, a licensee enters another person or entity’s premises for their own purposes rather than to benefit the property owner. A social guest is a typical example of a licensee. Property owners must warn about or repair known hazards on their premises—within a reasonable time—for a licensee’s benefit.

Finally, trespassers enter someone else’s premises without the owner’s permission. However, if the property owner is aware of the trespasser’s presence, they may owe the trespasser a legal duty of reasonable care. This duty is especially important if the known trespasser is a child who may not know better.

The Newport Beach premises liability attorneys at Bentley & More LLP can help you determine if the property owner in your case owed you a duty of care which they subsequently violated. If that happens, we can assist you with filing your claim and pursuing the monetary recovery you need for your premises-accident injuries.

Proving a Premises Owner’s Negligence

To recover monetary compensation for a premises accident claim, the accident victim must establish their legal burden of proof. In addition to showing that the premises owner owed them some legal duty of care, they must also show that the property owner violated their duty of care. For example, in a slip and fall accident, the property owner might have failed to clean up a spill within a reasonable time. Similarly, in a negligent security incident, the property owner may have failed to have sufficient security guards on their premises at a particular event.

Next, the accident victim must establish that the property owner’s violation of their legal duty of care directly caused the incident, leading to their physical injuries and other losses.

Sometimes, insurance companies are skeptical of premises accidents and injuries. They may feel that the accident victim brought about their own harm or ignored an open and obvious danger while on the premises.

If the insurance company disputes fault for your premises accident, we can retain an accident reconstructionist or another expert to testify in your case. Accident reconstructionists piece together how accidents occur by speaking with witnesses, reviewing photographs, visiting the incident scene, and reviewing investigation reports. They then draft their own report describing how the incident likely occurred and who likely caused it.

Our legal team can also retain a medical expert to testify in your case. A medical expert, who may be a treating doctor, can causally connect your claimed injuries to the premises accident. Moreover, if you likely suffered a permanent injury in your premises accident, a medical provider can state that fact in a medical report to a reasonable degree of medical certainty.

Factors That Influence a Monetary Damage Award

The monetary damages that a premises accident victim can receive in their case will depend primarily upon the nature and extent of their injuries, the medical treatment that they underwent, and the cost of that medical treatment. Other potential factors include whether they had to miss time from work after their accident and the amount of time they missed.

Premises accident victims can recover both economic and non-economic damages for their injuries. Economic damages compensate accident victims for their medical expenses, both past and future. In some instances, a medical provider may determine that someone who suffered a catastrophic injury needs medical treatment, such as future surgery, in the future. In those circumstances, the accident victim can recover their anticipated medical costs as part of their personal injury claim.

In addition, a premises accident victim whose injuries prevented them from working can make a claim for lost income. If they suffered a catastrophic injury that prevented them from working in any capacity or required that they take a pay cut and switch jobs, they might be eligible to make a claim for loss of earning ability.

In addition to these economic damages, premises accident victims can make a claim for non-economic recovery. These damages compensate accident victims for pain and suffering, inconvenience, and other intangible losses.

Those losses may include compensation for:

• Emotional distress
• Loss of the ability to use a body part
• Loss of spousal companionship
• Loss of life enjoyment
• Permanent disfigurement
• Lifetime care costs
• Humiliation

Furthermore, if a person suffers fatal injuries in a premises accident, their surviving family members can pursue a wrongful death claim, seeking various damages.

Our legal team can help you determine which damages you can recover as part of your premises accident claim or lawsuit. We can then help you pursue those damages through the settlement or litigation process.

Speak with a Newport Beach Premises Liability Attorney Today

Premises accident victims have a short time to take legal action for monetary damages. According to the Personal Injury Statute of Limitations in California, accident victims must file their lawsuit within two years of their accident date. Absent very limited circumstances, if they do not file their lawsuit on time, they forgo their right to recover any monetary compensation and damages. Therefore, accident victims must seek out the medical treatment that they need and contact an experienced attorney as soon as possible. Reach out to a Newport personal injury lawyer.

At Bentley & More LLP, we can investigate the circumstances of your premises accident, help you file a claim, and negotiate a favorable settlement offer from the handling insurance company adjuster. If litigation becomes necessary in your case, we can file a lawsuit on your behalf, assist you throughout the litigation process, and, if necessary, take your case to a civil jury trial for adjudication. We can also pursue alternative dispute resolution mechanisms, like binding arbitration or mediation, with you.

Our legal team will do everything possible to recover the maximum amount of monetary damages in your premises accident case. For a free case evaluation and legal consultation with a Newport Beach premises liability attorney, please call us at (949) 870-3800 or contact us online.

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Bentley & More LLP – Newport Beach Office

4931 Birch Street

Newport Beach, CA 92660

Phone: (949) 870-3800