West Hollywood Slip and Fall Lawyer

Owners are not automatically liable because someone fell. The claim turns on notice — whether the owner created the hazard, actually knew about it, or should have found it through reasonable inspection. A spilled drink two minutes old is a different case from a leak that staff walked past all evening.

Notice is proved with records, not memory: inspection and sweep logs, maintenance tickets, prior incident reports for the same spot, and staffing schedules. Those documents exist while the business still has them and disappear when nobody asks for them in time.

Almost every venue, hotel, and garage in West Hollywood records video, and most systems overwrite on a loop measured in days or a few weeks. The single most useful thing you can do is put the property on written notice that footage must be preserved. We send preservation letters immediately, and a documented refusal or failure to preserve is itself something a jury can consider.

Photograph the hazard before it is cleaned, from several distances, and photograph what the lighting actually looked like. Ask for a copy of any incident report you sign and note the name of the manager who took it.

A fall caused by a landlord's deferred maintenance is an ordinary two-year negligence claim (Code of Civil Procedure § 335.1). A fall on a public sidewalk, in a city park, or at a city-owned structure runs on the six-month government claim deadline instead (Government Code § 911.2).

West Hollywood's dense block pattern makes the boundary genuinely unclear — a broken segment of walkway may belong to the city, to the adjacent business, or to a private plaza that merely looks public. We identify the owner from parcel and maintenance records rather than assuming, and where it is ambiguous we protect both deadlines.