Slip and Fall Lawyer Serving Howell
Howell's slip-and-fall cases come out of its commercial spine: the shopping centers, supermarkets, and strip-mall lots strung along Route 9, plus the township's apartment communities and, in winter, the ice that forms across all of it.
A property owner in New Jersey owes people on their property a duty to keep it reasonably safe and to warn of hazards they knew about or should have discovered — a wet aisle with no cone, a pothole in a Route 9 lot, a staircase with a loose rail, a walkway that stayed icy long after the storm passed. The owner's insurer will almost always answer with the same two defenses: we had no notice of the hazard, and it was open and obvious anyway. Beating those defenses is about evidence and speed — photographs of the exact condition before it is mopped, salted, or patched; the incident report; witness names; and preservation demands for the store's surveillance video before it is overwritten. One more Howell-specific wrinkle: falls on public property, such as a municipal walkway or a county park facility like the areas around Manasquan Reservoir, fall under the New Jersey Tort Claims Act, which requires formal notice within 90 days. We handle these cases on contingency — no fee unless we win.
What We Know About Howell Cases
Notice is the heart of nearly every Howell premises case: not whether the hazard existed, but whether it existed long enough that a reasonable owner would have found and fixed it.
Supermarket and big-box cases along Route 9 often rise or fall on sweep logs and surveillance footage showing how long a spill sat; parking-lot cases turn on maintenance and snow-removal contracts that say exactly who was responsible for the ice you fell on — often a contractor the owner will try to point to.
New Jersey's ongoing-storm rule gives owners breathing room while snow is actively falling, but the clock starts once the storm ends, and refreeze the next morning is a classic Howell winter fact pattern.