Premises Liability and Dangerous Property Conditions in Prince George's County, MD
Maryland premises liability law turns on a question most injured people have never considered: what was your legal status on the property at the moment you were hurt? The answer determines what duty the property owner owed you, and it is frequently dispositive.
The Four Categories
An invitee (for example, a customer in a store, a tenant in the common areas of a leased building, a member of the public in a space held open for business) is owed the highest duty, which is reasonable care to protect against dangers the owner knows of or would discover through reasonable inspection. A licensee by invitation, most commonly a social guest, is owed a duty to exercise reasonable care to warn of known dangerous conditions the guest is unlikely to discover. A bare licensee, present with permission but for their own purposes, is owed only a duty to refrain from willful injury and from creating new hidden dangers. A trespasser is owed essentially only a duty to refrain from willful or wanton misconduct.
Notice is the Contested Issue
In most Maryland fall cases the fight is not over whether a hazard existed but over whether the owner knew about it or should have. Proving constructive notice generally requires evidence of how long the condition was present, which in a retail setting means inspection logs, sweep sheets, employee schedules, prior incident reports, and surveillance video. Video is the most valuable evidence in a premises case and the most perishable, because retention cycles are commonly measured in days or weeks. A preservation demand should go out before anything else.
Two Defenses that End Cases
Contributory negligence bars recovery entirely if the injured person's own want of ordinary care contributed to the fall. Assumption of risk operates independently and bars recovery where the person knew of and voluntarily encountered a known risk. Related to both is the open and obvious doctrine, under which a condition apparent to a reasonable person may relieve the owner of a duty to warn. These doctrines defeat a significant number of otherwise sympathetic Maryland falls, and any lawyer who evaluates your case without discussing them candidly is not giving you an accurate picture.
Government-Owned Property
If the fall occurred on county property, at a county facility, or at a public school, the Local Government Tort Claims Act notice requirement applies, and the damages recoverable against the local government are capped by statute. Injuries on state property are governed instead by the Maryland Tort Claims Act, which carries its own notice requirement. See https://www.peoples-law.org/suing-state-maryland-maryland-transit-administration-or-local-government-maryland-tort-claims-acts.