Canales v. Walmart Texas

A shopper slipped on water on the way to the restroom, hurt her knee, hip and arm, and sued. The store had the video, seventy-five minutes of it, and the case ended on one question: how long had the water been there, and could anyone say?

The rule

Texas law applied, and the shopper was the store’s invitee, the status Invitee explains. To recover, the court wrote, quoting its own earlier cases, she had to prove that “(1) Wal[m]art had actual or constructive knowledge” “of some condition on its premises;” “(2) the condition posed an unreasonable risk of harm;” “(3) Wal[m]art failed to exercise reasonable care to reduce or eliminate the risk; and (4) its failure to use” “reasonable care proximately caused her injuries.” Only the first element was in dispute, and the opinion sets out the three ways to prove it: “(1) the defendant caused the condition;” “(2) the defendant actually knew of the condition; or (3) ‘it is more likely than not that the condition existed long enough” “to give the premises owner a reasonable opportunity to discover it.’” The third is the one most spill cases turn on, and Texas measures it with three factors: “(1) the proximity of the employees” “to the hazard, (2) the conspicuousness of the hazard, and (3) the length of time the hazard existed.” Then the rule that decided this case. “Texas also recognizes the ‘time-notice rule’ which establishes that an employee’s proximity to a hazard is not enough” “to establish constructive knowledge when there is no evidence indicating how long the hazard was there.” “Thus, temporal evidence” “is required for a reasonable fact finder to assess whether the premises owner reasonably should have discovered the hazard” (Canales v. Walmart Texas, slip op. at 3 to 4). Notice is the Docket’s entry on the word.

The facts

The shopper was walking toward the bathroom in one of the company’s Texas stores when she “slipped and fell on water,” and she “told employees that she hurt her knee, hip, and arm.” She sued in Texas state court on a premises-liability theory; “Walmart removed the case to federal court based on diversity jurisdiction,” and then “moved for summary judgment, arguing that” she “could not establish the first element of premises liability:” “Actual or constructive knowledge of the dangerous condition.” “The district court granted summary judgment,” and she appealed (slip op. at 2). Her evidence was the store’s own security footage, seventy-five minutes of it, together with evidence she described as another woman slipping and another patron avoiding a puddle, and photographs of dirty footprints (slip op. at 4 to 5).

The holding

Affirmed. The shopper “primarily relies on security footage in her attempt to create a genuine issue of material fact” as to the store’s constructive knowledge, and the court took the footage apart in two steps. Proximity first: “Video evidence of employees walking near the area where” she “would fall is insufficient evidence” “without evidence of duration.” Duration second: “As for duration,” she “acknowledges that no change to the floor can be observed from the video footage.” “She argues that the lack of change in conditions proves that the water was on the floor for the entire seventy-five” “minute duration of the security footage.” The court would not draw that inference: “The district court properly found that this evidence, or lack thereof, did not create a genuine issue of fact,” citing the settled rule that “speculation and improbable inferences do not replace facts in showing a genuine issue for trial,” and setting the case against the Texas Supreme Court’s Brookshire Brothers decision, which found “a scintilla of evidence where there” “is a continuous video and ‘an employee signaling for help to clean up the spill’”. The other two shoppers did not help: “Construing the evidence in her favor, those two instances still fail to satisfy the constructive notice requirement” “because the first instance happened only eight minutes before” her fall. “We have previously held that an inconspicuous hazard that existed for longer” “than eight minutes was not legally sufficient to show constructive knowledge,” and the court listed the earlier lines: in Threlkeld, “a puddle of water existing” “for a maximum forty-five minutes was not legally sufficient to prove notice,” and in Shirey, “[T]he seventeen minutes” “during which the inconspicuous grape was on the floor did not afford” the store “a reasonable time to discover” “and remove the hazard.” Last, the footprints: “the Supreme Court of Texas has held that dirty footprints are not evidence” “of the duration of a hazard.” She “failed to meet the non-movant’s burden to create a genuine issue of material fact” as to constructive notice, and “Therefore, the district court’s grant of summary judgment is AFFIRMED” (slip op. at 4 to 5).

Why it matters

The opinion is unpublished and five pages long, and it says nothing new about Texas law. That is the point of reading it: this is the ordinary way a slip-and-fall case ends, and every sentence in it is a lesson about proof. First, the Texas rule is a clock. A store that spilled the water, or that was told about it, knew; everything else is constructive knowledge, which means the water was there long enough that a careful store would have found it, and the shopper has the burden of saying how long. Second, the court has now drawn its lines in minutes. Eight minutes was not enough here. Seventeen minutes was not enough for a grape. Forty-five minutes was not enough for a puddle no one noticed. The word doing the work in each of those is inconspicuous: the second factor, how visible the hazard was, is what the time must be measured against, so a record that shows a large, obvious spill in a busy aisle asks a different question from a film of clear water on a light floor. Third, the video is not the evidence; the timeline is. Seventy-five minutes that show no change prove only that the camera saw no change, and if the camera could not see the water, it cannot say when the water came. What the Brookshire Brothers record had, and this one did not, was a moment on the film when the store itself reacted. Fourth, the things a shopper can gather on the day of the fall, a photograph of the footprints, the name of another customer who slipped, are not enough by themselves, and the things that could be enough belong to the store: the full recording and not the clip the store chose to keep, the other cameras that saw the aisle, the sweep and inspection logs, the incident report, the schedule that says who was assigned to that part of the floor and when they last walked it. Those records are kept for a short time and overwritten, which is why the first letter in a premises case asks for all of them at once (Spoliation; The Phone describes the Brookshire Brothers rule for evidence that disappears). The firm’s page on premises liability explains the rest of the claim.

One caution. The court decided only that this record did not raise a fact question on notice. It did not decide how the water got there or whether the store was careless, and the shopper’s injuries were never tried.

Canales v. Walmart Texas, L.L.C., No. 25-20550 (5th Cir. Nov. 5, 2026) (per curiam; Elrod, C.J., Richman and Ramirez, JJ.; unpublished under Fifth Circuit Rule 47.5; the petition for panel rehearing was denied and this opinion substituted for the earlier one), from the Southern District of Texas, No. 4:24-CV-3203. Every quotation above is from the slip opinion at the pages given; the shopper is named in the caption and referred to here by role, and the store by name only where the court’s own words are quoted. The decisions the court cites for the elements, the three ways to prove knowledge, the three factors and the time-notice rule, and Threlkeld, Shirey and Gonzalez, are cited in the opinion and not read here; Brookshire Brothers v. Aldridge is read and described on The Phone. This is general information, not legal advice.