Greenville Premises Liability Lawyer
Hurt on someone else's property — a store, a parking lot, an apartment stairwell? Property owners in South Carolina owe real duties to the people they invite in. I hold them to those duties, and because falls leave people housebound, I come to you.
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Premises Liability Attorney in Greenville, SC
Here is the honest version of premises liability law, before the sales pitch you will find on other websites: falling on someone's property does not automatically entitle you to compensation. South Carolina law asks harder questions — why you were on the property, what the owner knew about the hazard, and when they knew it. Cases are won by answering those questions with evidence, and that work starts early.
I am Tom Conits. I handle premises cases across Greenville and the Upstate the same way I handle every case: you deal with me directly, from the first phone call to the last signature. And because premises injuries — broken hips, back injuries, torn knees — are precisely the injuries that make leaving the house miserable, I make house calls. If your fall left you on a walker in your living room, the consultation happens in your living room.
Fair warning about what you will not find here: no promise that your case is worth a specific number, and no pretending every fall is a lawsuit. If the facts are not there, I will tell you plainly and you will have lost nothing but a conversation.
If a fall left you stuck at home, I'll come to you.
I personally drive to clients' homes across Greenville and the surrounding counties — hospital rooms and kitchen tables included. You were just hurt; the last thing you need is a trip to a law office.
— Thomas Spiro Conits
Cases We Handle
Premises liability covers injuries caused by dangerous conditions on property someone else owns or controls. In my practice the recurring cases are:
- Slip and fall injuries — spilled liquids in grocery aisles, freshly mopped floors without warning signs, rain tracked into store entrances.
- Trip and fall hazards — buckled sidewalks and parking-lot potholes, curled floor mats, uneven thresholds, cords run across walkways.
- Stairway and railing failures — missing or loose handrails, broken steps, poor lighting in apartment stairwells.
- Falling merchandise — overstocked shelving in big-box stores.
- Inadequate security — assaults in parking lots and apartment complexes where owners ignored known crime problems and skipped basic measures like lighting and working locks.
- Dog attacks on someone else's property — a close cousin of premises law with its own strict-liability statute, covered in full on my Greenville dog bite page.
If your situation is not on that list, call anyway. The list describes patterns, not limits, and the consultation costs nothing.
Understanding Premises Liability Law in South Carolina
South Carolina premises law starts from a simple principle: the duty a property owner owes you depends on why you were there. Our courts — the leading discussion is the Court of Appeals decision in Sims v. Giles (2001) — recognize four classifications of people on land: invitees, licensees, adult trespassers, and children. The owner's obligations rise and fall with that status, which is why the first question I ask about any premises case is not "how bad is the injury?" but "why were you on the property?"
The second pillar is notice. Especially in slip and fall cases, South Carolina law does not make store owners insurers of their customers' safety; it makes them responsible for hazards they created or knew about — or should have discovered through reasonable care. Those two ideas, status and notice, decide most premises cases in this state, so the next two sections take them one at a time.
Invitee, Licensee, Trespasser: Why Your Status on the Property Matters
Invitees get the strongest protection. An invitee enters property for a purpose connected with the owner's business — every customer in every Greenville store — or as a member of the public on land held open to the public. To invitees, owners owe reasonable and ordinary care: keeping the premises reasonably safe, refraining from activity that makes the visit dangerous, and warning of latent or hidden dangers the owner knows about or should know about. As Sims puts it, the invitee enters with an implied assurance that the place has been prepared and made reasonably safe.
Licensees are owed less. A licensee enters with the owner's consent but primarily for the licensee's own purposes — the classic example is a social guest. The owner must use reasonable care in carrying on activities and must warn of concealed dangers the owner actually knows about, but a licensee otherwise takes the premises as the owner uses them.
Adult trespassers are owed the least — essentially a duty not to be harmed wilfully or through wanton conduct. Children are treated differently: the law recognizes that a child drawn onto property does not assess danger the way an adult does, and it holds owners to account accordingly.
Status arguments are where insurers quietly cut case values — recasting a customer as a mere licensee, or a licensee as a trespasser. The classifications have edges worth fighting over: in Sims itself, a utility meter reader injured on a customer's property was held to be an invitee, not a licensee, and the difference controlled the case.
Proving Notice: The Key to Winning an SC Premises Case
If you remember one thing from this page, make it this: in a South Carolina slip and fall involving a foreign substance, you must generally prove one of three things — the substance was put on the floor by the owner or its employees, the owner actually knew it was there, or it had been there long enough that reasonable inspection would have found it (constructive notice).
The South Carolina Supreme Court applied that rule in Wintersteen v. Food Lion (2001): a shopper slipped on clear liquid near a self-service drink station, and because there was no evidence any employee saw the spill or of how long it had been on the floor, the store won. That outcome is a warning. Sympathy does not carry these cases; timelines do.
Which is why the notice fight is an evidence fight, fought early:
- Surveillance video — the single best witness to how long a hazard existed, and routinely overwritten within days or weeks. A written preservation demand needs to go out immediately.
- Inspection and sweep logs — retailers keep them; gaps in them are evidence.
- Employee statements and staffing records — who was assigned to that section, and when they last walked it.
- Photographs — of the substance itself: its size, its edges, whether it had cart tracks or footprints through it, whether it had begun to dry. Details like these have carried the notice question in real cases.
- Prior complaints — earlier incidents involving the same leaky cooler or the same entrance on rainy days.
This is the work I front-load into every premises case, because a case built in the first two weeks negotiates very differently than one reconstructed a year later.
Where These Injuries Happen: Greenville Stores, Apartments, and Parking Lots
Premises cases track foot traffic, and Greenville's foot traffic has a geography. The Woodruff Road corridor is one of the busiest retail strips in the Upstate — big-box centers, chain restaurants, and shopping plazas stacked for miles, with congestion heavy enough that regional planners have studied the corridor for years. More shoppers per square foot means more spills, more hurried restocking, more overworked cleaning schedules — and more falls.
Haywood Mall on Haywood Road is South Carolina's largest shopping mall — over 1.2 million square feet, more than 120 stores anchored by Belk, Dillard's, Macy's, and JCPenney. Malls at that scale are premises-liability ecosystems: polished tile concourses, food-court spills, escalators, crowded seasonal displays, and a sprawling parking footprint that has to be maintained through Upstate rain and the occasional ice morning.
And beyond retail: Greenville's apartment growth has filled the county with complexes whose stairwells, breezeways, pools, and parking lots are the landlord's responsibility, not the tenant's. Grocery aisles, gas station forecourts, restaurant patios, office-park sidewalks — wherever an owner profits from your presence, the duty of reasonable care follows.
Photo slot: premises-woodruff-road
Do I Have a Case?
Three questions predict most premises outcomes, and you can ask them yourself before you ever call me:
- Why were you there? A customer or member of the public on open premises starts from the strongest legal position; a social guest's case must clear a higher bar.
- What was the hazard, and can we prove the owner knew — or should have known? A spill that hit the floor seconds before you did is a tragedy without a defendant. A hazard with a history — a chronic leak, a long-broken step, a rainy-day entrance with no mat — is a case.
- What are the damages? Emergency care, surgery, therapy, missed work. The claim must be worth the fight it will take.
One more variable: your own conduct. South Carolina's modified comparative negligence rule — adopted in Nelson v. Concrete Supply Co. (1991) — reduces your recovery by your percentage of fault and bars it only if your share exceeds fifty percent. Being partly careless does not end a premises case; it starts a negotiation about percentages, and that negotiation is winnable with evidence.
Compensation for Premises Liability Injuries
A successful premises claim can address the full sweep of what a serious fall takes: emergency and surgical care, physical therapy, future treatment for injuries that never fully resolve, the wages lost while you healed, reduced earning ability where the injury is permanent, and the pain, lost sleep, and lost independence that do not come with receipts. Falls are particularly cruel to older adults, for whom a broken hip can mean the difference between living at home and not.
I will not quote values on a webpage, because a herniated disc with a quick recovery and a herniated disc requiring fusion surgery are different cases even though they share a diagnosis line. What I will promise is the process: every category of loss documented, every applicable insurance policy identified, and no settlement recommendation until we understand what your recovery actually looks like. My fee is contingent — no fee unless we win — and the consultation is free.
Hurt and Homebound? The Clearest Case for a House Call
If a fall left you housebound, the consultation comes to your living room. Of everything I handle, premises injuries make the strongest argument for the way I practice: the same broken hip or back injury that gives you a case is the thing that makes driving downtown, parking, and sitting in a waiting room genuinely painful.
So don't. I personally drive to clients across Greenville and the surrounding counties — homes, hospital rooms, rehab facilities. I bring the paperwork, we go through your photographs and your questions at your kitchen table, and you keep my personal cell number when I leave. Read about how it works on the I Come To You page, or call (864) 777-1000 and tell me where you are — I will handle the driving.
"Every client gets my personal cell number. Call or text me directly — you'll never chase a case manager."
Clients hear back from me the same day — and for emergencies, anytime.
— Thomas Spiro Conits
Premises Liability FAQs
The store had me fill out an incident report. Was that a mistake?
No — an incident report is usually helpful, because it creates a dated record that the fall happened, where it happened, and who was on duty. What you should be careful about is what comes after: a recorded statement to the store's insurance adjuster, requests for blanket medical authorizations, or a quick settlement offer before you know how badly you are hurt. Ask for a copy of the report if you can, and talk to a lawyer before giving any recorded statement. The consultation is free, so there is no reason to guess.
I fell but nobody saw it happen. Do I still have a case?
Possibly. Plenty of legitimate premises cases start with an unwitnessed fall. What matters is what the other evidence shows: surveillance video, the condition itself (photographs of the spill, the broken step, the missing handrail), your immediate report to staff, medical records documenting injuries consistent with the fall, and inspection or cleaning logs showing how long the hazard sat there. The absence of an eyewitness makes prompt evidence preservation more important, not the case impossible.
How long do I have to file a premises liability claim in South Carolina?
Generally three years from the date of injury under S.C. Code Section 15-3-530. Claims against government entities can be subject to different and shorter rules. As a practical matter, the important deadlines come much sooner: store surveillance video is often overwritten in days or weeks unless someone demands its preservation in writing. Waiting costs evidence long before it costs you the legal deadline.
What if I was partly careless — say, I was looking at my phone?
You can still recover in South Carolina as long as you were not more than fifty percent at fault. Under the state's modified comparative negligence rule, your recovery is reduced by your percentage of fault rather than eliminated. Expect the property owner's insurer to push hard on this — arguing the hazard was open and obvious or that you were not watching where you walked. That argument has answers, and it is exactly the kind of fight a premises lawyer exists to have.
I was hurt at my apartment complex. Is the landlord responsible, or my neighbor?
It depends on where and how you were hurt. Landlords are generally responsible for the common areas they control — stairwells, walkways, parking lots, pool areas — and for conditions they created or knew about. Inside a rented unit, responsibility depends on the lease, who controlled the dangerous condition, and whether the landlord had notice of it. These cases turn on their specific facts, which is why I would rather look at your lease and your photographs than give you a rule of thumb that might be wrong for your situation.
Talk to Tom about your fall — free, at your place or his
Free consultation. No fee unless we win. If getting to an office is hard right now, Tom will come to you.
Office: 100 Williams St, Greenville, SC 29601 · (864) 777-1000