Premises Liability.

A business invites you in to make money from your visit. In exchange, the law says it owes you a reasonably safe place to be. When it does not, and you are hurt, that is a premises case.

Premises liability covers injuries caused by a dangerous condition on someone's property: a wet floor with no warning, a broken stair, poor lighting, a fall hazard left in a walkway. In Texas, how much the owner owed you depends on why you were there. A customer or other invited guest, an invitee, is owed the most: the owner must use reasonable care to make the property safe or to warn of hazards it knew about or should have found through reasonable inspection.

The fight in these cases is usually notice. The defense argues the owner did not know about the hazard and had no reasonable chance to fix it. Proving otherwise takes evidence gathered before it disappears: incident reports, inspection and cleaning logs, maintenance records, and surveillance video, which many businesses overwrite within days.

Negligent security

A distinct and serious branch of premises law is negligent security. When a property owner should foresee the risk of crime, because of prior incidents or the surrounding area, and fails to take reasonable measures like lighting, locks, or guards, the owner can share responsibility for an assault or injury that follows. These cases turn on what the owner knew about the danger and what a reasonable owner would have done about it.