Austin Retail Store Slip and Fall Attorneys

You Were an Invitee, Which Is Good News

Texas sorts people on someone else’s property into categories, and the category determines how much protection the law gives you.

A paying customer in a store is an invitee — the category owed the highest duty of care. The store must use ordinary care to keep the premises reasonably safe, and that duty includes a responsibility to reasonably inspect for hazards it does not already know about. A store cannot simply avoid looking and then claim ignorance.

That is a meaningfully stronger position than a social guest at a private home or a trespasser, both of whom are owed far less. Being an invitee is not, however, a guarantee of anything. It sets the standard. You still have to prove the store fell below it.

One point worth clearing up early: you remain an invitee even if you did not buy anything that day. Browsing, returning an item, using the restroom, or walking through to reach another store in the same center generally does not change your status.

The Four Elements

To recover, you generally must establish all four of the following:

• The store had actual or constructive knowledge of a condition on the premises.
• The condition posed an unreasonable risk of harm.
• The store failed to exercise reasonable care to reduce or eliminate the risk — by cleaning it up, blocking it off, or warning about it.
• That failure proximately caused your injuries.

Elements two, three, and four are usually straightforward in a real case. A puddle of liquid detergent on a polished floor is obviously an unreasonable risk. Walking past it without cleaning or coning it is obviously a failure of reasonable care. Landing on your hip obviously caused your fracture.

The fight is almost always over element one.

Actual Knowledge Versus Constructive Knowledge

Actual knowledge means somebody at the store already knew. An employee spilled it. An employee saw it. A customer reported it to the service desk. A leak had been called in that morning.

Actual knowledge cases are the strongest cases in this practice area, and they are much less common than people expect. Most spills in a large store are created by customers and nobody reports them.

Constructive knowledge means the store did not actually know, but the hazard sat there long enough that a reasonably careful store operating a reasonable inspection routine would have found it. This is where the overwhelming majority of retail falls live, and it is where they are won or lost.

The Three Ways to Establish Notice

Texas courts generally recognize three paths:

• The store put the substance there itself. An employee mopped, sprayed, stocked, or dropped something.
• The store actually knew the substance was on the floor.
• It is more likely than not that the condition existed long enough to give the store a reasonable opportunity to discover it.

That third path is the one that requires evidence of time. Texas calls the requirement the time-notice rule, and without some proof of duration, the claim fails as a matter of law — regardless of how serious your injuries are and regardless of how dangerous the condition obviously was.

This strikes many people as unfair, and it is worth understanding the reasoning. Courts have held that without a time element, stores would effectively face strict liability for any hazard on their floors, including one created by another customer thirty seconds earlier. Texas has consistently rejected that.

The practical result is real, though. If a shopper dropped a jar of olive oil ninety seconds before you rounded the endcap, no inspection routine on earth would have caught it, and there is generally no claim — even with a shattered wrist and six months of therapy.

What the Texas Supreme Court Decided in April 2026

On April 10, 2026, the Texas Supreme Court decided H-E-B, LP v. Peterson. It was unanimous, and it matters directly to anyone who fell in an Austin store.

What Happened

A shopper slipped on a puddle of clear liquid in a grocery store toy aisle and injured her knee. After falling, she saw water on the floor and believed she saw water dripping from a ceiling rafter above her.

The facts looked favorable. The store had experienced repeated roof leaks over the previous year during an ongoing remodel — buckets, signs, and trash cans catching water in other parts of the building. It had rained earlier that day. And surveillance video established that no employee had walked down that aisle in the two hours before she fell.

She lost anyway. The trial court granted summary judgment for the store, the court of appeals revived the claim, and the Texas Supreme Court reinstated the summary judgment.

What the Court Rejected

Each of the following was held insufficient to establish how long the puddle had been on the floor:

• Prior roof leaks elsewhere in the store. The Court held that a leak has to be in the vicinity of the hazard. Problems in other departments do not transfer to the aisle where you fell.
• The size of the puddle. A large puddle is not proof of an old puddle.
• Observing water dripping from above after the fall. Evidence of a possible cause is not evidence of duration.
• Rain having stopped two hours earlier. It established when water became available, not when it reached the floor.
• No employee inspecting the aisle for two hours. This is the counterintuitive one. A two-hour inspection gap shows the store *could* have discovered the hazard, not that the hazard was actually there for two hours.
• The store’s own written inspection policies. Internal policies do not raise the legal standard of care above what the law already requires.

What the Court Said Does Matter

Constructive knowledge turns on three factors working together: longevity, proximity, and conspicuity. How long the hazard existed, how close employees were to it, and how noticeable it was.

Longevity is essential. Proximity and conspicuity can strengthen a case built on duration evidence, but neither can substitute for it. An employee standing six feet from an invisible spill for an unknown length of time proves nothing about notice.

The Case That Shows What Winning Looks Like

The Court contrasted an earlier Texas decision in which surveillance video showed employees repeatedly walking past a large grease spill during the five minutes before the plaintiff slipped. That video was some evidence of constructive knowledge — because it established duration and proximity together, on camera, at the exact spot.

Read those two cases side by side and the lesson is blunt. The difference between a Texas retail slip and fall case that survives and one that is dismissed before trial is frequently just this: did somebody preserve the video.

What Peterson Means for Your Case

Three practical consequences:

• Circumstantial workarounds are largely closed. Arguments that used to feel persuasive — the store had leak problems, the puddle was big, nobody was checking — no longer carry a case by themselves.
• Location specificity now controls. Maintenance records matter only if they concern the area where you fell. Broad requests for a store’s entire repair history are less useful than they used to be.
• Evidence preservation moved from important to decisive. When the indirect routes to proving duration narrow, the direct route becomes the whole case. The direct route is video and inspection logs.

If you consulted a lawyer before spring 2026, or you are reading a law firm page written before then, the framework you were given is incomplete. This is a genuinely recent shift.

Why Surveillance Video Decides Your Case

Large retailers operate extensive camera systems, typically covering entrances, registers, main aisles, high-theft departments, and increasingly most of the sales floor.

What Video Can Actually Show

• The hazard appearing on the floor, and the exact time it appeared
• How long it remained before your fall — the single element Texas requires
• How many employees passed it, how close they came, and whether any of them looked
• Whether a warning cone was present, and whether one appeared only after you fell
• Whether the substance was visible against the flooring
• The fall itself, which forecloses arguments about how the injury happened
• The store’s response afterward, including how quickly staff arrived and what they said

How Long Stores Keep It

Most systems overwrite on a rolling cycle. Thirty days is common. Some run shorter — one to two weeks — depending on the system, the number of cameras, and the storage configuration at that specific location.

Stores are generally not obligated to preserve footage simply because a customer fell and an incident report was written. Many retailers will save a short clip around the incident for their own claims file, which is not the same thing as preserving the hour of footage before the fall — and the hour before is the part that proves duration.

A formal written preservation demand needs to reach the right people while the footage still exists.

What a Preservation Letter Has to Say

A generic letter asking a store to “preserve all evidence” is close to useless. An effective demand identifies:

• The specific store number and address
• The date and as precise a time window as possible
• The exact location inside the store, by department and aisle
• The camera angles covering that location, and a request for all of them rather than one selected view
• A defined window before the fall — not just the moment of the fall — because duration is what matters
• Sweep logs, inspection records, work orders, and staffing records for that shift
• An instruction to suspend any automatic overwrite or deletion routine

This is why the first phone call matters more in retail falls than in almost any other injury case. Nearly everything else can wait a few weeks. This cannot.

Do Not Count on a Spoliation Remedy

People often assume that if a store destroys the footage, a judge will simply instruct the jury to assume it would have helped you. In Texas, that remedy is much harder to obtain than it sounds.

Texas generally requires a showing that the party acted with intent to conceal discoverable evidence, or that a negligent loss irreparably deprived the other side of any meaningful ability to present its case. The trial judge decides these questions outside the jury’s presence, and courts have been reluctant to impose the harshest remedies.

So the strategy of letting the video disappear and arguing about it later is not a strategy. It is how cases end.

Sweep Logs, Inspection Records, and the Incident Report

Video is the strongest proof of duration, but it is not the only evidence, and in some stores camera coverage of a particular aisle simply does not exist.

Safety Sweep and Zone Inspection Logs

Most large retailers document floor inspections on a defined schedule, often by zone or department, with an employee initialing each pass.

These logs cut both ways, which is exactly why they are worth obtaining:

• A log showing the last inspection three hours before your fall supports an argument that a hazard could have gone unnoticed for a long time.
• A log showing an inspection five minutes before your fall helps the store considerably.
• A log signed off for an inspection that video shows never happened is a very different case, and a much more serious one.

Logs also establish what the store considered a reasonable inspection interval for that area, which becomes useful context even though, as Peterson confirms, internal policy does not itself set the legal standard.

The Customer Incident Report

A manager typically completes a customer incident or accident report the same day. It usually records the time, location, your description, witness names, employee names, whether an ambulance was called, and sometimes photographs.

Ask for a copy before you leave the store, and write down the report number and the manager’s name. Many stores will decline to give you one. Ask anyway, note who declined, and keep that detail. The report generally becomes obtainable through the litigation process.

Maintenance and Repair Records

Refrigeration units, ice machines, produce misters, roof sections, drink stations, and automatic doors all generate service records. After Peterson, the critical qualifier is location. Records showing repeated leaks in the dairy department carry little weight if you fell in the toy aisle.

Targeted requests aimed at the specific area, fixture, or system near your fall are far more valuable than broad ones.

Prior Incidents at the Same Location

Other customers falling at the same spot, or repeated complaints about the same recurring condition, can support a theory that the store actually knew about an ongoing hazard. A recurring-condition theory can sometimes sidestep the need to prove how long this particular puddle sat there, because the argument shifts to knowledge of the pattern.

The Honest Caveat

A store’s failure to follow its own inspection policy does not by itself raise the standard of care, and it does not substitute for evidence of duration. It can be persuasive to a jury and it can help establish timing indirectly, but it is not a shortcut around the time-notice rule. Any page or any lawyer telling you otherwise is working from an outdated understanding.

The Person Who Called You Is Not an Insurance Company

This surprises nearly everyone, and it should change how you handle the first two weeks.

How Big-Box Claims Handling Actually Works

Most national retailers are substantially self-insured for routine customer injury claims. Rather than reporting your fall to an outside insurance carrier, they handle it through an in-house claims subsidiary or an outside third-party administrator that works on their behalf.

The person on the phone may sound like an insurance adjuster and may use the same vocabulary. Functionally, they are the retailer’s own claims operation, evaluating a claim against the retailer’s own money.

They are professional, generally courteous, and not neutral. None of that is an accusation. It is simply the structure, and you should know it before the conversation rather than after.

The Recorded Statement Request

The call usually comes within one to three days. The request is framed as routine, and often as necessary before the claim can be processed.

Consider what you actually know at that point. You do not know the full extent of your injuries, because imaging and specialist evaluations have not happened yet. You have not seen the video. You do not know how long the substance was on the floor. You may still be on pain medication.

Statements taken in that window are used later to lock in descriptions that turn out to be incomplete or wrong. “I didn’t see anything on the floor” is an honest answer that can be repurposed. “I’m feeling okay” three days before an MRI shows a herniation is a problem.

You can report the incident to the store, cooperate with basic identifying information, and still decline a recorded interview about how the fall happened until you have advice.

The Early Offer

Quick resolution offers are common and are often modest — covering an emergency room copay, waiving a bill, or providing a gift card. Sometimes they arrive framed as goodwill rather than settlement.

Anything you sign in exchange generally closes the claim permanently, including for injuries that have not fully surfaced. Herniated discs, torn rotator cuffs, and post-concussive symptoms frequently declare themselves weeks after the fall.

Why Self-Insured Defendants Fight Differently

A traditional liability insurer weighs defense costs against exposure and often prefers to resolve modest claims efficiently. A large self-insured retailer facing thousands of customer claims a year has a different calculation: settling weak claims generously invites more of them.

The practical effect is that these defendants often litigate smaller claims harder than an outside carrier would, and they are well equipped to do it. That is not a reason to avoid bringing a legitimate claim. It is a reason to build one properly from day one instead of assuming it will settle on its own merits.

How the Store Investigates You

While you are deciding what to do, the store’s claims operation is already working. Knowing what that looks like helps you avoid handing them arguments.

• Prior claim history. Insurers and administrators share claims databases. A history of previous injury claims will be found, and will be used to suggest a pattern. Having prior claims does not bar a legitimate case, but concealing them damages credibility badly. Tell your lawyer up front.
• Social media. Public posts, photographs, check-ins, and even posts by friends and family that tag you. A photo of you at a wedding does not mean your back is fine, but it will be shown to a jury without that context. The safest approach is to stop posting about your activities entirely while a claim is pending.
• Surveillance. In cases involving significant claimed damages, investigators may record you in public. This is legal within limits. Live consistently with what you tell your doctors, and there is nothing to worry about.
• Medical records. Expect a request for authorization to obtain your records. Broad, unlimited authorizations covering your entire medical history are commonly requested and often overbroad. This is worth having reviewed before you sign.
• The store’s own witness statements, taken the same day from employees while memories are fresh and while nobody is representing your side of the story.

None of this is sinister. It is standard claims practice. It simply happens faster than most injured people move, which is the imbalance a lawyer exists to correct.

Suing Walmart Is Different From Suing H-E-B

Here is a strategic difference that almost no law firm page explains, and it can reshape your entire case.

Federal Removal

Most national big-box retailers are out-of-state corporations. When an out-of-state defendant is sued in Texas state court and the amount in dispute is large enough, that defendant can generally remove the case to federal court — for Austin, the United States District Court for the Western District of Texas, Austin Division.

H-E-B, by contrast, is a Texas company. A Texas resident suing a Texas defendant generally cannot be removed on that basis, so the case ordinarily stays in state court — often the district courts served by the Travis County District Clerk.

Why Venue Matters

• Different procedural rules, disclosure obligations, expert designation practice, and scheduling.
• A different jury pool. A federal division draws from a much wider geographic area than a Travis County panel, which can meaningfully change who hears the case.
• Different summary judgment practice. This matters enormously in a case type where the defense plan is to win on the notice element before trial ever happens.
• Different timelines, which affects how long you wait and how litigation costs accumulate.

Decisions Made at Filing

Some choices made when a lawsuit is first filed influence whether removal is available at all, including how damages are pleaded and which parties are named. Those decisions cannot be revisited later.

None of this makes one retailer easier to sue than another. It means the case should be built differently depending on who the defendant is — and it is one reason a page about Walmart claims is genuinely not the same page as one about H-E-B claims.

Who Is Actually Responsible

The name on the sign is not always the only defendant, and sometimes it is not the right one.

• The retail operating entity. Large chains operate through subsidiaries with legal names that differ from the brand. Suing the wrong entity wastes time and occasionally costs a deadline. Texas registrations can be checked through the Texas Comptroller’s taxable entity search.
• The property owner or landlord. Especially relevant for parking lots, sidewalks, and shared walkways in a shopping center, where control is often split between the tenant and the landlord by lease.
• A janitorial or floor care contractor. Many large stores outsource cleaning, waxing, and floor maintenance. An improperly applied finish or a mopped floor left unmarked by a contractor adds a defendant and a separate insurance policy.
• Third-party vendors who stock their own products. Beverage, snack, bread, and beer vendors frequently service their own displays with their own employees. A spill or obstruction created during a vendor’s restocking may not be the store’s doing at all.
• Refrigeration, HVAC, and maintenance contractors responsible for equipment that leaked.
• Construction and remodel contractors, which matters in Austin where major stores are frequently under renovation while remaining open.
• A product manufacturer, where defective packaging or a failed container caused the spill. That can become a product liability claim running alongside the premises claim.

Identifying every responsible party early matters for a practical reason beyond fairness: it determines how much insurance coverage exists, and coverage is the real ceiling on most recoveries.

Common Big-Box Store Hazards

Grocery, Produce, and Deli Spills

Liquids on polished concrete or vinyl tile, produce misters overspraying into walkways, dropped and broken containers, rotisserie and deli grease, floral department water, and melted product from freezer cases. These are the classic time-notice battles, and the ones where video is most often decisive.

Clear liquids on light flooring are especially common and especially difficult, because low conspicuity cuts against you on one of the three constructive-knowledge factors.

Entrance Water and Mats

Rain tracked through entryways, missing mats, bunched or curled mats, and mats that have stopped absorbing. Weather is foreseeable, and a store that knows it is raining has a stronger reason to inspect entrances frequently — which can support an argument that a reasonable inspection interval should have been shorter than usual that day.

Refrigeration and Freezer Leaks

Condensation, defrost cycle discharge, failing door seals, and ice buildup produce recurring puddles in predictable spots. Recurrence is legally useful, because it can support actual knowledge of an ongoing condition rather than requiring proof of how long one particular puddle sat.

Recently Mopped or Waxed Floors

A cleaned floor with no warning cone, an inadequate or poorly placed cone, a cone set out only after someone fell, or a newly waxed surface with an inappropriate coefficient of friction.

When the store created the hazard itself, the analysis shifts substantially in your favor, because you no longer need to prove how long it existed. Somebody at the store put it there.

Falling Merchandise From High Shelves

This is a distinct claim type, and warehouse-format stores make it common. Improperly stacked pallets, overloaded racking, unsecured bulk inventory stored above head height, items shifted during forklift retrieval over customer aisles, and unstable display stacks.

These cases focus on stacking, securing, and storage practices rather than the time-notice rule, which often makes them easier to prove than a slip case. Injuries tend to be serious — head, neck, and shoulder trauma from heavy objects falling from significant height.

Parking Lots, Cart Corrals, and Curbs

Potholes, crumbling asphalt, wheel stops placed in walking paths, unmarked curb transitions and ramps, faded striping, inadequate lighting, drainage that ices in a rare Austin freeze, and cart corral overflow blocking pedestrian routes.

Parking lot cases raise a control question almost immediately: who was responsible for maintaining that area, the store or the landlord? Lighting and layout problems can also implicate negligent security if a crime rather than a fall occurred.

Stocking Equipment and Displays

Pallet jacks, flatbeds, and rolling stock carts left unattended in aisles, pallets staged on the sales floor during business hours, box cutters and shrink wrap on the ground, and end-cap displays protruding into walkways.

Where an unsafe display or stocking method itself created the danger, the claim may proceed on a theory that does not depend on proving how long a substance sat on the floor.

Restrooms, Garden Centers, and Seasonal Departments

Restroom floors near sinks and hand dryers. Garden centers with hoses, standing water, spilled soil, and transitions between concrete and outdoor surfaces. Seasonal departments set up quickly with temporary fixtures and heavier-than-normal foot traffic. These areas are frequently inspected less consistently than main sales floors.

Automatic Doors and Thresholds

Doors closing prematurely on shoppers, malfunctioning motion sensors, uneven thresholds, and transitions between flooring types at entrances.

Falls in Shopping Center Common Areas

Many Austin big-box locations sit inside larger shopping centers, and that changes the analysis in a way that catches people out.

Responsibility for parking lots, sidewalks, landscaping, exterior lighting, and shared walkways is usually allocated by lease between the tenant and the property owner or a management company. Some leases put common area maintenance entirely on the landlord. Others assign portions to tenants. A management company may handle day-to-day upkeep for the owner.

Practically, this means:

• The store may correctly say it did not control the area where you fell.
• The landlord may point back at the store, or at a maintenance contractor.
• The lease itself becomes evidence, and it is obtainable in litigation.
• Naming only the store can leave the actually responsible party out of the case.

If you fell outside the building rather than inside it, note precisely where — relative to the entrance, the striping, and the property lines — because that detail often determines who the defendant is.

When the Injured Shopper Is an Older Adult

A significant share of serious retail falls involve older shoppers, and those cases deserve to be handled with more care than they usually get.

The medical stakes are different. A hip fracture in an older adult is not a broken bone in the ordinary sense — it frequently means surgery, a period of immobility, loss of independence, and in some cases a permanent change in living situation. Recovery is slower and less complete.

The legal challenges are also different, and stores raise them predictably:

• Pre-existing conditions. Arthritis, prior joint replacements, osteoporosis, and degenerative disc disease are common at any age above sixty and will be used to argue your symptoms are age-related rather than fall-related.
• Balance and mobility. Prior falls, use of a cane or walker, or medications affecting balance will be raised as alternative explanations.
• Comparative fault. Arguments that a reasonable person should have been more careful.

Texas law does not reduce what an older person is owed. A well-established principle holds that a defendant takes an injured person as they find them — meaning a store does not get a discount because the customer it injured was more fragile than average. Where a fall accelerates or worsens a pre-existing condition, that aggravation is compensable.

Practically, these cases require careful medical work: establishing the person’s actual functional baseline before the fall, through medical records and through people who knew them, rather than allowing the defense to characterize them as already declining.

What to Do After a Fall in an Austin Store

What you do in the first hour, and the first week, largely determines whether you have a provable case at all.

Before You Leave the Store

• Report it to a manager. Make sure a written incident report is created, and write down the report number and the manager’s name.
• Photograph the hazard immediately, before anyone cleans it. Take wide shots showing the aisle and your location within the store, and close shots showing the substance itself. Include something for scale.
• Photograph the surrounding area, including whether a warning cone was present. If there was no cone, photograph the absence of one.
• Look up and photograph the ceiling. Note where cameras are and which direction they face. This helps identify exactly which footage to demand.
• Photograph your shoes and clothing, including any transferred substance.
• Get names and phone numbers of witnesses, including any employee who responded. Customers scatter and are almost impossible to find later.
• Ask for a copy of the incident report. You may be refused. Ask anyway and note who refused.
• Do not clean the substance off yourself or let anyone clean the area before you have documented it, if you are physically able.

In the First Few Days

• Get medical attention the same day. Adrenaline masks injuries, and a delay is the first thing used against you.
• Keep the shoes, uncleaned. Footwear is a standard defense argument and the actual shoes let it be tested rather than assumed.
• Write down everything you remember while it is fresh — what you were doing, where you were looking, what employees said afterward.
• Decline a recorded statement until you have talked to a lawyer.
• Do not accept a gift card, bill waiver, or quick check in exchange for signing anything.
• Do not sign broad medical authorizations without review.
• Stay off social media about the fall, your injuries, and your activities.
• Follow through on treatment. Gaps in care are used to argue you recovered.
• Call a lawyer within days, so a preservation letter goes out before the video retention cycle runs.

What the Store Will Argue

Knowing the playbook in advance makes it much less unsettling when it starts.

• No evidence of duration. The central defense after Peterson, raised on summary judgment, and the reason video matters so much.
• Open and obvious. That the hazard was plainly visible and an attentive person would have avoided it. This argument weakens considerably when the substance was clear, the lighting was poor, or displays drew attention away from the floor.
• You were distracted — looking at your phone, reading shelf labels, managing children or a cart. Note that stores design displays specifically to draw attention to shelves rather than floors, which is a fair response.
• Your footwear was worn, inappropriate, or lacked tread.
• Pre-existing conditions explain your symptoms.
• Gaps in treatment show you were not seriously injured.
• A third party caused it — another customer, a vendor, a contractor.
• Your prior claims suggest a pattern.

Most of these are comparative fault arguments rather than complete defenses. They go to percentages, not to whether you have a case at all.

What If I Was Partly at Fault?

Texas applies proportionate responsibility. If you are found 50 percent or less responsible, you recover your damages reduced by your percentage of fault. At 51 percent or more, you recover nothing.

So a $100,000 case with a 20 percent fault finding becomes a $80,000 recovery. The same case at 51 percent becomes nothing. That cliff is why fault allocation is fought over so hard.

Being distracted, wearing the wrong shoes, or failing to notice a clear liquid on a light floor does not automatically end your claim. It is an argument about percentages, and it is one worth having. Do not disqualify yourself before a lawyer has looked at the facts.

Paying for Treatment While Your Case Is Pending

This is the question that keeps people up at night, and most law firm pages skip it entirely.

Unlike a car crash, there is no personal injury protection coverage sitting behind a store fall. The store’s claims administrator will not simply pay your medical bills as they arrive, and waiting for a settlement can take a year or more.

The realistic options:

• Your health insurance. Use it. Some people avoid it thinking it will hurt their claim; it does not. Your insurer will typically assert a lien or subrogation interest against any recovery, meaning it gets reimbursed at the end. Those amounts are frequently negotiable, and reducing them is a meaningful part of what a lawyer does for you.
• Hospital liens. Texas hospitals can assert liens against a personal injury recovery for emergency care. These attach automatically in certain circumstances and need to be identified and addressed before settlement.
• Letters of protection. Some providers will treat you now and wait to be paid out of the eventual recovery. This can be the only realistic path for someone without insurance, but it is worth understanding the tradeoffs: LOP balances are sometimes higher than insured rates, and defense lawyers routinely use LOP arrangements to argue that treatment was litigation-driven rather than medically necessary. It is a tool, not a default.
• Medicare and Medicaid. These programs have their own reimbursement rights with specific procedures that must be followed. Settling without addressing them properly creates serious problems afterward.

The general principle: get treatment, use whatever coverage you have, keep every bill and explanation of benefits, and make sure someone is tracking every lien from the beginning rather than discovering them at settlement.

Deadlines That Apply

• Days to weeks — surveillance video. The practical deadline that decides most cases. Retention cycles are short and nobody is obligated to preserve without a demand.
• Weeks to months — sweep logs, work orders, and staffing records, which are also subject to retention schedules.
• Two years — the [statute of limitations](https://statutes.capitol.texas.gov/Docs/CP/htm/CP.16.htm) for personal injury and wrongful death claims in most cases.
• As short as 45 days to six months if you fell at a government-operated facility rather than a private retailer. Governmental notice deadlines are far shorter and easy to miss entirely.
• Minors generally have limitations tolled until adulthood, though a parent’s own related claims may not be.

The two-year deadline is the one everyone knows about. It is almost never the one that costs someone their case.

Injuries and Compensation

Falls onto hard retail flooring produce a recognizable injury profile: hip and femur fractures, wrist and forearm fractures from bracing, shoulder tears from catching yourself, herniated cervical and lumbar discs, knee injuries including meniscus and ligament tears, ankle fractures, facial and dental injuries, and traumatic brain injury from striking the floor or a fixture on the way down.

Falling merchandise produces head, neck, shoulder, and crush injuries. Severe outcomes proceed as catastrophic injury claims, and fatal falls as wrongful death actions.

Recoverable damages typically include:

• Emergency care, surgery, hospitalization, and follow-up treatment
• Future medical care, injections, revision surgery, and physical therapy
• Lost wages and diminished earning capacity
• Physical pain and mental anguish, past and future
• Physical impairment — the loss of the ability to do things you used to do
• Disfigurement and scarring
• In-home assistance, mobility equipment, and home modifications
• Out-of-pocket costs and property damage
• Loss of household services and, for a spouse, loss of consortium

Anyone who fell while working in a store rather than shopping is in a different system entirely. See our Austin workplace accident practice.

How a Retail Fall Case Actually Proceeds

People want to know how long this takes and what happens along the way. A rough map:

Weeks One Through Four

Preservation demands go out immediately. Medical treatment gets established. The claim is reported and the claims administrator is redirected to your lawyer, so the calls to you stop. Scene investigation and witness contact happen while memories are current.

Months Two Through Six

Treatment continues and the medical picture develops. Records and bills are collected. Video and inspection records are pursued. This period is largely about letting the injury declare itself — settling before you know whether you need surgery is how people end up undercompensated.

Demand and Pre-Suit Negotiation

Once treatment stabilizes, a demand package goes to the claims administrator. Some cases resolve here. Self-insured retail defendants often do not, particularly where notice is contested.

Filing Suit

If pre-suit negotiation fails, suit is filed, with venue and removal posture planned in advance. Expect the defendant to answer and, if it is an out-of-state chain, to consider removal early.

Discovery

Written discovery, document production, and depositions of store employees, the manager who wrote the incident report, and corporate representatives on inspection practices. This is where video and sweep logs are actually obtained if they were preserved.

Summary Judgment

Expect a motion arguing no evidence of notice. This is the pivotal moment in a Texas retail fall case and the reason everything else is built around duration evidence.

Mediation and Resolution

Most cases that survive summary judgment resolve at mediation. A minority are tried. Overall timelines commonly run twelve to twenty-four months, longer if the case is removed or contested aggressively.

How We Handle Retail Fall Cases

1. Free Case Review

We take the full account, identify the correct corporate entity and any contractors or landlords, and assess honestly whether duration can be proven.

2. Same-Week Preservation Demand

Written demand to the store and its claims administrator for surveillance footage covering a defined window before the fall, sweep and inspection logs, the incident report, maintenance records, and staffing records. This is the first thing we do, not the last.

3. Independent Investigation

Scene inspection and measurement, identification of camera coverage, witness interviews, lease and control research where the fall was outside, and a search for prior incidents at the same location.

4. Straight Assessment

If the video is gone and duration cannot be established any other way, we tell you plainly. Texas law is unforgiving on this element, and we would rather say so in month one than in year two.

5. Claim Presentation

We handle the claims administrator directly so the calls stop, build the medical and damages record, and present a demand once your treatment picture is clear.

6. Litigation and Resolution

If suit is necessary, venue and removal posture are planned from the outset. Because these defendants are self-insured and defend aggressively, cases resolve fairly only when the file is built as though it will be tried.

Questions Worth Asking Any Lawyer You Consider

Retail falls attract high-volume practices, and not every firm handles them the same way. Reasonable questions to ask before signing anything:

• When will a preservation letter go out, and what will it ask for? If the answer is vague, or it is not happening this week, that is a meaningful signal.
• How does H-E-B, LP v. Peterson affect my case? Anyone handling Texas retail falls should know the April 2026 decision and be able to explain what it changed.
• Who will actually work my file, and can I speak with an attorney?
• What do you think the weaknesses are? A lawyer who describes only strengths at the first meeting is selling.
• How are case costs handled if we do not recover?
• Who negotiates my medical liens, and when?

Why Injured Shoppers Choose Kelley Wolff Injury Attorneys

• We move on video in the first week. After Peterson, that is not a formality — it is the case.
• We know the current law. The controlling decision is months old. A firm working from the pre-2026 framework will misjudge these claims in both directions.
• We identify the right defendant, including contractors, vendors, and landlords that are easy to miss.
• We deal with the claims administrator so you do not have to.
• Honest screening. If duration cannot be proven, you will hear it from us early rather than after a year of waiting.
• We handle the liens, because what you keep matters more than the headline number.
• Local practice across Travis, Williamson, Hays, Bastrop, and Bell counties, in both state and federal court.
• Contingency representation. No attorney’s fee unless we recover, and we advance case costs.
• Direct attorney access. You will be able to reach Travis S. Kelley and Colin Wolff about your case.

Talk to an Austin Retail Slip and Fall Attorney

Texas retail fall cases are won and lost on one question: can you prove how long the hazard was there. The Texas Supreme Court reinforced that in April 2026, and it left very little room for guesswork or good arguments unsupported by evidence.

The proof that answers that question is sitting on a store’s recording system right now, on a timer that nobody has stopped. Almost everything else about your case can wait a few weeks. That cannot.

Consultations are free. If we do not think duration can be proven, we will tell you that instead of taking your time. If we do take your case, you pay no attorney’s fee unless we recover for you.