Slip & Fall Lawyer in California

Two years under Cal. Code Civ. Proc. § 335.1 for a claim against a private landowner. But if the fall happened on public property — a city, county, state, transit agency (BART, LA Metro, MUNI, OCTA), public school, public hospital, or state park — you have just six months to present a formal claim under Cal. Gov. Code § 911.2. If the claim is rejected, you have six months from the rejection to file suit under § 945.6. Missing the six-month government claim presentation deadline bars the entire case, regardless of how much time remains on the main two-year statute. This is the single biggest trap in California premises liability practice.

Under Rowland v. Christian, 69 Cal.2d 108 (1968), a California landowner owes a general duty of ordinary care to everyone on the property — the traditional invitee/licensee/trespasser distinctions do not apply. The Rowland factors (foreseeability, certainty of injury, connection between conduct and injury, moral blame, prevention of future harm, and burden on the defendant) govern the duty analysis. For retail cases, Ortega v. Kmart Corp., 26 Cal.4th 1200 (2001) is the controlling authority: plaintiff must prove actual or constructive notice of the dangerous condition, and the retailer's inspection interval is a key factor in whether constructive notice can be inferred.

Priority: store surveillance footage (often overwritten in 7-30 days), sweep logs and inspection schedules, employee training records, prior incident reports for the same location, and photographs of the hazard and the surrounding area from the day of the fall. Under Ortega v. Kmart, a retailer's failure to inspect on a reasonable schedule can itself support constructive notice — which makes the sweep log the single most important document in the file. Send a spoliation letter to the property owner within days demanding preservation of video, inspection records, and incident reports. Chain retailers destroy this evidence on routine retention schedules if not formally preserved.

California's open-and-obvious doctrine is weaker than Pennsylvania or Texas. An obvious hazard does not automatically relieve the landowner of duty in California — the Rowland factors still control, and the question is whether the harm was foreseeable even though the hazard was visible. Combined with pure comparative fault under Li v. Yellow Cab Co., 13 Cal.3d 804 (1975), a plaintiff who was partly at fault for not seeing an obvious hazard can still recover a share of damages from a landowner who failed to maintain the property. The exact percentage of fault is a jury question.