Fort Lauderdale’s vibrant Las Olas Boulevard and beachside districts are bustling hubs for dining and shopping. However, the high foot traffic combined with spilled drinks, tracked-in rainwater, and uneven sidewalks often leads to overlooked hazards. Under Florida’s premises liability laws, businesses in Broward County are legally responsible for maintaining safe environments for their patrons. If you have suffered a slip and fall injury, understanding the precise legal requirements to prove your case is the only way to secure a fair settlement.
The Burden of Constructive Knowledge
In Florida, a business is not automatically liable simply because you fell on their property. According to Florida Statute 768.0755, if you slip on a “transitory foreign substance” (like a puddle of water or a dropped piece of food), you must prove that the business had either actual or constructive knowledge of the hazard.
Actual knowledge means a manager or employee was told about the spill before you fell but did nothing. Because this is hard to prove, most cases rely on constructive knowledge. To establish constructive knowledge, you must present circumstantial evidence showing:
- The dangerous condition existed for such a length of time that, in the exercise of ordinary care, the business should have known about it (e.g., a puddle with cart tracks or footprints already through it).
- The condition occurred with such regularity that it was highly foreseeable (e.g., a leaky refrigerator that routinely pools water on the floor).
Why Defense Teams Fight Back
Commercial insurance policies for restaurants and retail stores deploy aggressive defense strategies. They will immediately review surveillance footage to argue the spill happened just seconds before your fall, thereby negating the “constructive knowledge” requirement. They will also argue that under Florida’s 51% Modified Comparative Negligence law, you were mostly at fault for failing to watch where you were walking or for wearing inappropriate footwear.
Because Broward County juries frequently handle high-density commercial claims, local settlement multipliers for orthopedic injuries—such as broken wrists, hips, and torn knee ligaments—are often substantial, provided you can overcome the initial liability hurdle. Always evaluate your potential payout using independent 2026 metrics before speaking to a corporate adjuster.