In Beceren v. Joan Realty LLC, decided January 14, 2015, the Appellate Division, Second Department held that a defendant property owner was entitled to dismissal of plaintiff’s slip-and-fall case.
In this case, plaintiff alleged that she was injured when she slipped and fell on water in a vestibule area in Brooklyn apartment building owned or maintained by defendant.
The court summarized the law as follows:
A defendant who moves for summary judgment in a slip-and-fall case has the initial burden of making a prima facie showing that it neither created a dangerous condition nor had actual or constructive notice of its existence for a sufficient length of time to discover and remedy it. While a defendant [is] not required to cover all of its floors with mats, nor to continuously mop up all moisture resulting from tracked-in rain, a defendant may be held liable for an injury proximately caused by a dangerous condition created by water, snow, or ice tracked into a building if it either created the hazardous condition, or hadactual or constructive notice of the condition and a reasonable time to undertake remedial action.
Applying the law, the court reversed the lower court’s order denying summary judgment to defendant:
In support of its motion for summary judgment, the defendant established its prima facie entitlement to judgment as a matter of law by demonstrating that it did not create any dangerous condition in the vestibule area, or have actual or constructive notice of any such condition prior to the plaintiff’s accident. In opposition to the defendant’s prima facie showing, the plaintiff relied almost exclusively on the affidavit of an expert, which failed to raise a triable issue of fact. To the extent that the expert opined that the vestibule floor was inherently slippery due to its smoothness, that is not an actionable defect.