Can You Make a Personal Injury Case from a Parking Lot Accident?

Whether you can make a case for personal injury in a parking lot accident depends on many factors. What was the accident? Did it involve a customer’s car or an official vehicle? Or did you fall and injure yourself due to poor lighting or excessive debris, or both! Were you a pedestrian or a driver?

All of these questions must be answered before the original question can be definitively answered. Assuming someone has direct liability, such as a person backing out of a parking spot who by law must yield to pedestrians, then yes, you may have a case. If the driver is going forward and you dart out between two cars and are hit, then you probably don’t have a case.

What Kind of Parking Lot Accidents Are Covered?

Suppose you are walking down a Melbourne, Florida department store parking lot aisle looking for your car and the employees who collect the carts are also in that aisle. Something happens and they lose control of the carts and they roll towards you knocking you down. You break your wrist from the fall.

Now, you are clearly not responsible because you are where you are supposed to be. The employee may or may not be responsible. If the employee lost control because a mechanism in the equipment used to move the carts failed, the responsibility may shift to the company that maintains the equipment, the equipment maker and the store itself for not knowing that the equipment had a problem.

You may also be able to sue if a problem occurs because of the condition of the parking lot. Here you are going to a store that is open until midnight. You pull into the parking lot and the only available spots are where the parking lot lights are out, leaving the area quite dark and difficult to see. You park there because you have no choice. As you walk down the parking aisle to get to the store, you catch your foot in a hole in the pavement; a hole that you couldn’t see because the parking lot lights are out.

Here is a case where the company that maintains the lot could be held liable for the hole and the missing parking lights. In addition, if the company is contracted by the store, they could be held liable as well. If it is contracted by the owner of the property that the store may simply be leasing from, then they may be found liable. None of these groups will talk to you easily without a lawyer.