A slip and fall lawsuit is a premises liability claim brought by someone injured on another person’s property, and the current climate for these cases is defined by two forces pulling in opposite directions: juries are handing down verdicts that routinely reach seven and eight figures, while several states passed laws in 2025 that make it harder for plaintiffs to recover. If you were hurt on someone else’s property, or you own property and worry about exposure, the rules that govern your case may have changed in the last year.
Recent Verdicts Show Where Awards Are Landing
A handful of recent cases illustrate what juries are doing when liability is clear and injuries are serious.
In October 2025, an Orange County, Florida jury awarded a 44-year-old woman $11,391,183.28 after she tripped in a Target parking lot in Winter Garden on December 23, 2019. The seam where asphalt met the concrete gutter of the curb created an unmarked, abrupt change in elevation that the plaintiff argued violated multiple building codes. She suffered fractures to her left ankle, right tibia, right fibula, and right lateral malleolus and underwent multiple surgeries. The jury found Target 90% at fault. Target’s highest pretrial settlement offer had been $250,000.
In May 2023, a Broward County jury awarded Richard Tulecki $7.81 million after he slipped on a wet substance near a Burger King bathroom in July 2019. The award was later reduced to $7.68 million to account for insurance payments. The franchise operator, Seven Restaurants LLC, appealed, and in July 2024 Florida’s Fourth District Court of Appeal reversed the judgment and ordered a new trial limited to damages. The appeals court found the trial court had abused its discretion by allowing a doctor to give surprise mid-trial expert testimony that contradicted his deposition.
Deborah Revette, 60, slipped on clear liquid laundry detergent in the chemical aisle of a Dollar General store in Mobile County, Alabama on July 9, 2012. She endured eight surgeries, 395 doctor visits, and more than $470,000 in medical bills, and was left permanently disabled. After two mistrials, a jury awarded her $1,725,000 in September 2016, and the Alabama Supreme Court upheld the verdict. Testimony at trial established that Dollar General’s inspection policies amounted to roughly 10 minutes of inspection during a 14-hour workday.
Holly Averyt, a 41-year-old truck driver from Wyoming, slipped on ice and grease at a Walmart loading dock in Greeley, Colorado. Three spine surgeries later, her career was over. A Colorado jury awarded her $15 million in November 2010. The Colorado Supreme Court reinstated the verdict in November 2011 after a lower court had granted a new trial, reducing the total to roughly $10 million to comply with the state’s cap on non-economic damages. The court found that any jury prejudice had been “invited” by Walmart’s own trial conduct, including its refusal to acknowledge the spill.
Craig Walters, 49, slipped on smashed fruit in a Kroger in Douglasville, Georgia, sustained a spinal cord injury, and incurred $135,000 in medical bills. A Gwinnett County jury awarded $2.3 million after the judge determined that Kroger had intentionally destroyed surveillance footage of the incident, footage the company had earlier claimed either did not exist or had been taped over.
Why Verdicts Keep Climbing
Jury awards of $10 million or more, often called nuclear verdicts, have become markedly more common in premises liability. A 2022 U.S. Chamber of Commerce Institute for Legal Reform analysis found that premises claims accounted for 15.4% of the 1,376 nuclear verdicts handed down across all personal injury categories between 2010 and 2019. The median nuclear verdict rose 27.5% over that period, outpacing inflation.
Economic damages, meaning medical bills and lost wages, make up only 14% of these award totals. Pain and suffering and punitive damages drive the rest. Plaintiff attorneys increasingly use “anchoring,” suggesting very large damage figures in closing arguments to set a baseline in jurors’ minds, and “reptile theory,” framing cases around community safety threats to trigger emotional responses.
New York is the extreme case. Premises liability accounts for nearly 30% of all nuclear verdicts in the state, driven largely by Labor Law § 240, the “Scaffold Law,” which imposes absolute liability on property owners and contractors for gravity-related construction injuries regardless of a worker’s own negligence. New York is the only state with such a law. Scaffold Law cases have increased 500% since 1990 even as injury rates have declined, and the combined value of the top 15 New York personal injury outcomes in 2024–2025 reached $1.1 billion. A single settlement for the 2016 Tribeca crane collapse was valued at $272.5 million.
Negligent security claims against businesses have produced similarly large awards. In June 2023, the Georgia Supreme Court upheld a $42.75 million verdict against Georgia CVS Pharmacy in Georgia CVS Pharmacy, LLC v. Carmichael, a case arising from a robbery and shooting in a pharmacy parking lot. The court held that foreseeability of third-party criminal conduct should be judged on the totality of circumstances, not whether substantially similar crimes had previously occurred at the same location. A separate Florida case produced a $21 million settlement in 2024 after a murder in an apartment complex parking lot.
State Tort Reforms That Changed the Rules in 2025
Four states passed significant tort reform packages in 2025 that directly affect how slip and fall and other premises cases are tried and valued. If your injury occurred in one of these states, the law that applies to your case may depend on when it happened.
Georgia
Governor Brian Kemp signed Senate Bills 68 and 69 on April 21, 2025. The law prohibits anchoring in closing arguments, meaning attorneys cannot compare pain-and-suffering damages to unrelated figures like professional athlete salaries. Damage arguments must be tied to actual evidence and remain consistent between opening and closing. Property owners are now liable for third-party criminal conduct only if they had particularized warning of imminent wrongful conduct or actual knowledge of prior substantially similar incidents on or near the premises. Juries must apportion fault among the owner, the perpetrator, and any other responsible parties, and the law creates a rebuttable presumption that assigning more fault to the owner than to the person who committed the crime is unreasonable.
The legislation also allows bifurcated trials that split liability from damages, and limits recovery of medical expenses to amounts actually paid rather than higher billed amounts that were written off. SB 69 requires third-party litigation funders to register with the state banking department and subjects agreements over $25,000 to discovery.
South Carolina
Governor Henry McMaster signed the Tort Reform and Liquor Liability Act (H. 3430) on May 28, 2025, effective for claims accruing on or after January 1, 2026. The law abolishes joint and several liability for defendants found less than 50% at fault, with narrow exceptions. If a plaintiff’s own fault exceeds 50%, recovery is barred entirely. Nonparty tortfeasors and settling parties can appear on the verdict form, potentially diluting the share of fault assigned to any single defendant.
Louisiana
Governor Jeff Landry signed two bills on May 28, 2025. HB 431, effective January 1, 2026, shifts Louisiana from pure comparative fault to a modified system, barring recovery if the plaintiff is 51% or more at fault. HB 450 eliminates the longstanding “Housley presumption,” which had let plaintiffs presume that an accident caused their injuries if the condition did not exist beforehand.
Arkansas
Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders signed HB 1204 on February 11, 2025, effective August 3, 2025. It restricts recovery of past medical expenses to amounts actually paid or owed, eliminating “phantom damages” from billed amounts that were never paid due to negotiated insurance rates.
What You Have to Prove
The underlying framework is the same across jurisdictions. A plaintiff must establish that the property owner owed a duty of care, that the owner breached that duty, that the breach caused the fall and injuries, and that actual damages resulted.
The most frequently contested element is notice. You typically need to show either actual notice (the owner knew about the hazard) or constructive notice (the hazard existed long enough that a reasonable inspection would have caught it). That is why inspection logs, the length of time a spill sat on the floor, and whether employees followed cleaning protocols become central at trial.
The duty itself depends on the visitor’s legal status. Customers and other “invitees” who enter for the owner’s commercial benefit are owed the highest duty: regular inspections, prompt repairs, and warnings about known dangers. Social guests and other “licensees” must be warned about known hazards, but the owner has no duty to go looking for hidden ones. Trespassers are owed only the duty to avoid intentional harm, with different rules often applied to child trespassers. A minority of states, including California, use a unified “reasonable care” standard for all visitors.
Defenses That Reduce or Defeat a Claim
Property owners and their insurers lean on a few recurring defenses. The most powerful is comparative or contributory negligence, which shifts blame to the injured person. In most states, recovery is reduced by the plaintiff’s percentage of fault. Under modified comparative negligence rules, now expanding to Louisiana and South Carolina, a plaintiff who is 50% or 51% at fault recovers nothing. Alabama, Maryland, North Carolina, and Virginia still follow pure contributory negligence, where any fault at all on the plaintiff’s part can bar recovery entirely.
The “open and obvious” defense argues that the hazard was so apparent a reasonable person should have seen and avoided it. Lack of notice is another standard argument: if a spill occurred moments before the fall and no employee had a reasonable opportunity to find and clean it, the owner may not be liable. Adjusters also focus on what shoes the plaintiff was wearing, whether they were looking at a phone, and whether they ignored posted warning signs, all to build a comparative fault argument.
Suing a Government Property Owner
If you fell on government property, different and stricter rules apply. Under sovereign immunity, government entities cannot be sued without their consent, and most states have waived that immunity only subject to specific procedural requirements.
The biggest difference is timing. In New York, you must file a formal Notice of Claim with the municipality within 90 days of the incident, and a lawsuit within one year and 90 days. In California, the filing window is six months from the date of the accident, with the agency having 45 days to respond; if the claim is denied, you have six months to sue. Louisiana requires written notice to the government agency, with some entities enforcing deadlines as short as six months. These windows are dramatically shorter than the general statutes of limitations for private-property claims.
Government defendants may also assert “design immunity,” arguing that the sidewalk configuration or drainage pattern was built to approved engineering plans and so cannot support liability. Punitive damages are generally unavailable against government entities.
Deadline to Sue by State
For claims against private property owners, most states give you two or three years from the date of injury:
- One year: Kentucky and Tennessee.
- Two years: Alabama, Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Texas, Virginia, and West Virginia, among others.
- Three years: New York, Massachusetts, Michigan, Maryland, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Washington, Wisconsin, and others.
- Four to six years: Nebraska, Utah, and Wyoming allow four years; Missouri allows five; Maine and North Dakota allow six.
Deadlines can be extended in limited circumstances, such as when the injured person is a minor or is mentally incapacitated. Claims against government entities run on their own shorter clocks that operate alongside these general deadlines. Missing either deadline usually ends the case permanently.
Typical Settlement Ranges
Roughly 95% of slip and fall cases settle before trial, with typical settlement values ranging from $10,000 to $150,000. Most cases resolve within 3 to 18 months. Those averages hide wide variation. Spinal cord injury settlements can reach $1.5 million to $2.5 million. Traumatic brain injuries from falls tend to settle between $500,000 and $1 million. Minor soft tissue injuries may resolve for $10,000 to $20,000.
Setting matters. Construction site falls produce the highest-value claims, $100,000 to $10 million or more, partly because of strict liability statutes like New York’s Scaffold Law. Sidewalk defect cases can reach $1 million. Retail store falls, which make up a large share of filings, typically settle between $15,000 and $300,000. Rising medical costs and inflation have pushed demands higher, and plaintiff attorneys increasingly use economic experts to project long-term damages. Insurers have resisted increases and, in some cases, slowed the claims process to limit payouts.
The reforms of 2025 are new, courts have not finished applying them, and plaintiff attorneys are already adapting. If your fall happened recently or is about to produce litigation, the state where it occurred and the date of injury will largely determine which set of rules decides your case.