Winning Stairway Fall Cases With Building Code Violations
Stairway and handrail falls turn on measurements, not guesswork. Here is how to build the code case, retain the right expert, and dismantle…
Author
Caleb Mercer
Premises, products, and appellate correspondent. Covers slip-and-fall and notice doctrine, design and warning-defect product cases, and the appellate decisions reshaping plaintiff-side personal injury practice. Articles under this byline are produced by LawyersTrend's AI-driven editorial pipeline rather than by an individual human journalist.
The Statute of Repose: The Product Time Bar That Kills Claims Early
A statute of repose can extinguish a product claim before your client is even hurt. Here is how repose differs from limitations, why state…
When a Clean Driving Record Reverses a Defense Verdict
A Missouri appellate reversal in a truck case shows how a defendant's driving record can cross the line from relevant to prejudicial, and w…
The Recurring Condition Doctrine: A Route Around Proving Notice
When a plaintiff cannot pin down how long a specific puddle sat on the floor, the recurring condition doctrine lets a jury infer notice fro…
The Storm-in-Progress Rule and How to Beat It
Defense counsel treats storm-in-progress as a matter of law that ends winter slip cases. Built as a factual dispute over what fell and when…
The Heeding Presumption and the Warning-Defect Causation Gap
Warning cases die on causation. The heeding presumption fills the gap by presuming a plaintiff would have followed an adequate warning, but…
Proving the Slick Floor With Coefficient-of-Friction Data
Some slip-and-fall cases do not turn on notice at all. They turn on whether the floor was unreasonably slick, and that is a measurement a t…
Crashworthiness and the Enhanced-Injury Second Collision
The manufacturer's duty is not to prevent the crash but to avoid aggravating the injury. Building the enhanced-injury case, from Larsen to…
Boyer v. City of New York and the Verdict That Survived JNOV
The Second Department reinstates a hit-and-run ambulance verdict, restating the 'utterly irrational' standard and showing how agency GPS an…
The Surveillance Video That Vanished: Spoliation in Premises Cases
In a premises case the video is usually the case. Here is how to preserve it, what overwritten footage is worth, and how to build the spoli…
The Component-Parts Doctrine and When the Supplier Stays In
The component-parts doctrine sends generic suppliers home, but two exceptions keep the right defendant in. Here is how to plead and prove t…
Beating the Trivial Defect Doctrine in Trip-and-Fall Cases
The trivial defect doctrine ends more sidewalk cases than any other premises defense. Beating it means winning the aggravating-circumstance…