$2.5 Million Settlement for Slip and Fall on Icy Sidewalk

$2.5 million settlement at mediation for this 50-year-old Nassau County store manager, who slipped and fell on an icy sidewalk abutting a retail drugstore chain. The plaintiff landed hard on her side and eventually required a lumbar surgery and two neck surgeries, leaving her with migraine headaches. With respect to liability, testified that she had notified the store manager and showed her where she fell, and then accompanied the manager into the store to file a report on the store’s corporate hotline. Through discovery, we learned that the store contracted with a national weather service company to clean all their lots and sidewalks of snow and ice. They act as a dispatcher and then hire local “mom & pop” companies to plow, shovel, and de-ice. Overall, as the case moved along, the defendants claimed they had no accident report, no video despite cameras facing the fall location and no daily checklist of complaints noted by the manager. In addition, contracts between the drugstore and weather service company were very specific that the property needed to be sanded and salted prior to any precipitation. We also located photographs of what the area surrounding the store looked like after a snowstorm two weeks earlier, which demonstrated that clean-up efforts had been sub-par. After defeating the defendant’s motion to dismiss the case, the case was resolved.