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Surveillance footage retention policy at stores varies by location, and many systems record over old video on a loop. Illinois does not impose a general duty on a store to keep footage of your fall. To preserve it, report the fall in writing, note the exact time and camera areas, and have a lawyer send…

Maybe you were looking at your phone for a second. You should have noticed the hazard before you hit it. Now you’re wondering if that one lapse wipes out your entire claim before it even starts. It doesn’t, not automatically. The comparative negligence percentage Illinois courts assign to you determines how much your settlement shrinks,…

A toddler grabs a dangling blind cord and loops it around like a necklace. Nothing happens, you catch it in time, and your heart rate takes a few minutes to come back down. That moment is the reason window blind cord safety is a documented, regulated issue, not an overreaction to an ordinary household object.…

Window washers work suspended well above the ground, often on rigging and equipment they didn’t install and don’t control. When something goes wrong, from a rigging failure to an anchor point that was never properly maintained, the resulting fall raises a different set of legal questions than a typical workplace injury. A window washer accident…

Every spring, as Chicago apartments open their windows for the first warm days of the year, the city’s Department of Buildings issues the same reminder: window falls involving young children happen every year, and most are preventable. Window fall prevention is partly a parenting issue and partly a building maintenance one, and knowing where the…

Bulk warehouse stores are built differently than a typical retailer, and that layout creates hazards most stores don’t have. Towering steel shelving, forklifts moving through the same aisles customers shop in, and pallets of heavy merchandise stacked well above head height all come with the warehouse format. Warehouse store injuries often trace back to these…

Walk through a big-box electronics store, and you’ll notice something a grocery store doesn’t have: heavy merchandise stacked at eye level and above, narrow aisles packed with display units, and cords running across the floor connecting every demo screen to an outlet. Those details change what kind of injuries actually happen there, and they’re often…

You fell at a restaurant with a name you’d recognize anywhere. The logo was the same one you’ve seen in a dozen cities. So the claim should be simple, right? Go after the big company behind the sign. It usually isn’t that simple. A slip and fall in a restaurant carrying a national brand name…

Coffee shop slip and fall claims differ from typical store falls because the hazards usually come from customer-facing self-serve areas, not employee-restocked aisles, and the injury often combines a fall with a hot liquid burn. These two factors change what evidence matters and who ends up responsible. What Makes These Falls Different From a Typical…

A scar does more than mark where an injury happened. It can change how someone feels every time they look in the mirror, long after the physical pain has faded. Illinois law recognizes this directly, and understanding scarring disfigurement damages Illinois courts actually starts with knowing that this loss is treated as its own distinct…