$650,000 Settlement – Slip and Fall at Queens Grocery Store
Slip and fall cases are often harder than they look. Stores fight them aggressively, and they have well-practiced defenses. But when a grocery store allows a liquid hazard to sit on its floor for over two hours without posting a single warning sign, the evidence tells its own story. In 2023, Linden Law used surveillance footage to tell that story – and recovered $650,000 for our client.
The Case
Our client was shopping at a Queens grocery store when they slipped on a wet floor and fell hard. There was no wet floor sign. There was no cone. There was no warning of any kind. The fall caused a torn ACL and a torn meniscus in the right knee – injuries that required surgery followed by six months of physical therapy before our client could return to normal activity. The store’s response was immediate and predictable: an incident report was taken, and nothing was offered.
The Injury
Tearing both the ACL and the meniscus in the same fall is not a minor event. These are the structures that stabilize the knee and allow it to function under load. The surgery to repair them – typically an ACL reconstruction with meniscal repair or partial resection – requires general anesthesia, a hospital stay, and a lengthy rehabilitation process. The first weeks post-surgery involve significant pain and near-total restriction of activity. The physical therapy that follows is intensive and must be completed carefully to avoid re-injury.
Our client’s recovery stretched across six months of formal physical therapy, with the constant uncertainty that comes with any knee reconstruction: would the graft hold, would full stability return, would there be lasting vulnerability? By the time the case resolved, our client had recovered well – but “well” for an ACL reconstruction still means a knee that bears monitoring for the rest of one’s life.
How We Established Liability
Premises liability cases against stores hinge on notice. Did the store know – or should it have known – about the hazard? Our job was to prove that they did.
We moved quickly to preserve the surveillance footage before it was overwritten, which is standard practice for store security systems. What that footage showed was decisive: the liquid on the floor was visible on camera for more than two hours before our client’s fall. In that entire window, no employee walked through the area with a mop, no cone was placed, no sign was posted. Store staff passed by the area. The hazard sat there, unaddressed.
Two hours of constructive notice is not a close call under New York law. A reasonable inspection protocol would have caught and addressed a spill in a fraction of that time. The footage established both that the store had constructive notice and that it failed completely to act on it.
Challenges We Overcame
The store’s insurer did not concede the case gracefully. Their first line of defense was to challenge the surveillance footage itself – arguing that the liquid in the footage was not in the exact area where our client fell, and that we couldn’t be certain it was the same spill.
We had anticipated this. We worked with a video analysis expert who could precisely map the location visible in the footage against the physical dimensions of the store aisle. We also obtained the store’s own cleaning logs for the day in question, which showed no documented cleaning activity in the relevant aisle during the two-hour window visible on camera. The insurer’s argument collapsed under the weight of its own internal records.
They then pivoted to arguing that our client should have noticed the hazard and walked around it – a comparative fault argument. We pushed back hard: a liquid on a supermarket floor, in a busy shopping environment, with no warning sign or marking of any kind, is exactly the kind of hazard that premises liability law was designed to address. The store had a duty. It failed. That is the case.
The Outcome
The case settled for $650,000. Our client received compensation for the surgery, the months of physical therapy, lost wages during recovery, and the pain and limitations they endured throughout. The grocery store had two hours to prevent this. They chose not to act. Linden Law made sure that choice had consequences.
For more on slip and fall claims in Queens, visit our slip and fall practice area page or our Queens personal injury page.
Injured in a similar accident? Call (212) 804-8440 for a free consultation. No fee unless we win.