Galloway Johnson Tompkins Burr & Smith secured another victory through summary judgment with Florida litigators M. Austin Moretz and Kirsten Freiheit working together to deliver a positive outcome for our clients, a landscaping contractor, in a premises liability case at an apartment in Clay County, Florida.
In this trip and fall case, the Plaintiff claimed she tripped over an extended sprinkler head while walking through a flower bed to her daughter’s apartment, resulting in several injuries requiring surgery. Austin and Kirsten implemented key defensive strategies and worked with our client to achieve their legal and business objectives.
The Galloway team used its depth of knowledge on Florida law involving stacking inferences in this case. In Florida, a jury may not stack inferences to determine that a party had actual knowledge of a dangerous condition. Additionally, the possibility of causation is not sufficient to establish liability. According to case law, if the only way a jury can find that a party was negligent is by stacking inferences, then a directed verdict is warranted.
Austin and Kirsten successfully argued via summary judgment that there was no direct evidence our client was negligent in maintaining the sprinkler system and there was no evidence establishing how long the sprinkler head had been extended, or what had caused it to be extended before the Plaintiff fell. In granting Defense’s motion for summary judgment, the Court applied Florida’s prohibition against improper stacking of inferences. For this case, the first inference would be that the extended sprinkler head was a result of Defendants’ negligence; however, because there was no direct evidence of what caused her to fall, the Plaintiff would have to rely on a second inference, that she tripped over the extended sprinkler head. The Court explained that, because the Defendants’ negligence was not the only reasonable inference that would be drawn from the circumstance of the extended sprinkler head, the Plaintiff cannot stack the second inference onto the first to establish proximate cause.
The Clay County circuit court ruled in favor of our clients on May 29, 2024, and denied the Plaintiff’s motion for rehearing on November 12, 2024. Once again, Galloway Johnson Tompkins Burr & Smith went way above and way beyond in protecting the rights of property owners and contractors with experienced and knowledgeable premises liability attorneys, like Austin and Kirsten, from the earliest stage of claims investigation to litigation that our clients have come to expect from our results-driven representation.