“So the question was asked, what do I do after a slip and fall accident? So the first thing to do is take care of your, your physical health. So if you had a serious injury and you need emergency medical care, get yourself to a doctor or a hospital immediately. Don’t worry about the case. However, if you don’t have to leave the store or the business by an ambulance, if it’s not an injury where you’re in such pain that you cannot, uh, you cannot speak to anyone. File an incident report with the store manager. And again, this goes for whether it’s a grocery store, any type of business, don’t presume everything is on camera. So go to the store manager, file an incident report. And the reason why that is so important is, I mean, imagine if you’re a store and you don’t know anything about an incident at the store and then weeks, months, whatever the case may be, you get a demand from a lawyer claiming that there was a fall at your store.
Sounds pretty suspicious, right? So document it, try to do it at the scene because again, the store is going to want to try to find any type of witnesses and if there’s a substance on the ground, they’re going to want to document that. Uh, now if you did go to the hospital immediately and you weren’t able to make a report, as soon as you’re feeling better, go back there and file a report and he should get, they should leave you with some type of paperwork confirming the accident claim was made. Now next step in the process would be to contact a lawyer because slip and fall cases aren’t like auto accident cases where there’s a $10,000 worth of pip. Money’s sitting there to pay your medical bills. The next step in the process and how you’re going to get medical treatment is pretty important. So you need to do that in conjunction with the lawyer.
And basically what your lawyer is going to tell you is you have really two possible options. First option would be if you have health insurance to bill through the health insurance, whatever medical treatment you need. Or the second option would be if you don’t have health insurance to find a doctor who will treat you on what’s called a letter of protection. And those doctors who are willing to do that, we’ll likely have a relationship with your doc, with your lawyer, because you know, sort of think about it. Uh, if you’ve got a slip and fall case where the recovery is potential, are questionable in the future and your dot. And this doctor doesn’t know the lawyer and doesn’t know their track record of success, are they really going to treat you indefinitely and run up big bills potentially if they’re not comfortable with that lawyer? So the relationship between your doctor and your lawyer is actually somewhat important for a slip and fall case. So again, document the accident, whether it’s that day or shortly thereafter, contact a lawyer and then get yourself a in for medical treatment would be my advice for how to handle a slip and fall case. Good luck.”
*The above has been transcribed by a third party service and has not been checked for accuracy.
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