What to Do After a Slip and Fall in Florida

What you do in the first two days after a slip and fall in Florida matters more than anything that happens in the two years afterward. Not because of a legal deadline — that one is generous by comparison — but because the evidence that decides these cases lives on a property owner's camera system and in a manager's paperwork, and it starts disappearing on a schedule nobody outside the building can see.

Here is the short version, then the reasoning, then the parts almost nobody tells you.

The First 48 Hours

1. Do not get up fast. Take a moment. People compound a fall by standing on an ankle that will not hold.
2. Photograph the hazard before anyone cleans it. The puddle, the torn mat, the missing stair nosing — plus wide shots showing where it sat, the lighting, and whether any warning cone was there. Photograph your shoes on your feet.
3. Report it to a manager before you leave. Ask that an incident report be made. Write down the manager's name whether or not they give you a copy.
4. Get witness names and phone numbers yourself. Not the store's list — yours. Shoppers leave and are never found again.
5. Ask, in writing, that the surveillance video be preserved. An email or text the same day beats a phone call, because it is dated and it exists.
6. See a doctor, and say you fell. The mechanism of injury needs to be in the first medical record, not added at visit four.
7. Keep the shoes and clothes you were wearing, unwashed. Bag them. Do not clean the soles.
8. Write down what you remember tonight. Time, aisle, what you were carrying, who came over, what they said out loud.

Why Those Eight, and What Breaks When You Skip One

Every item on that list is doing one job: answering the question a Florida jury will be asked to decide. Under Fla. Stat. § 768.0755, if you slip on a transitory foreign substance in a business establishment, you must prove the business had actual or constructive knowledge of the dangerous condition and should have taken action to remedy it. Constructive knowledge can be proven by circumstantial evidence showing the condition existed for long enough that the business should have known about it in the exercise of ordinary care, or that it occurred with regularity and was therefore foreseeable.

Read that again with the checklist in mind. Nearly the entire fight is how long the hazard was on the floor. Not whether you were hurt. Not whether the floor was wet — the store will often concede that. How long.

Almost nothing you personally witnessed answers that question. You arrived at the end of the story. What answers it is the footage, the inspection or sweep log, and the testimony of whoever walked that aisle before you did. All three are in the property's hands, which is why steps 3 and 5 exist and why doing them late is expensive.

The photograph in step 2 is the one piece of that proof you can take with you. A picture showing a dried edge on a spill, a cart track through it, or footprints already in it is circumstantial evidence of duration that nobody can overwrite. Take it before a mop appears, because — as below — the mop is worth less to you than the photo.

Step 6 fails quietly and often. When the first record of a fall is a visit three weeks later, the defense does not have to argue you were not hurt. It argues the injury came from something else in those three weeks. If you are ever going to be talked out of a claim, that gap is where it happens. Our free slip and fall notice and evidence checklist walks through what to ask for and in what order, if you want to work through your own fall item by item.

The Video Rule Changed on January 1, 2025

This is the part that is wrong on most of the pages you will read today, because most of them were written against a rule that no longer exists.

Surveillance footage is electronically stored information. Until the start of 2025, Florida Rule of Civil Procedure 1.380(e) was a safe harbor, adopted by the Supreme Court of Florida in 2012: absent exceptional circumstances, a court could not sanction a party for electronically stored information "lost as a result of the routine, good faith operation of an electronic information system."

That subdivision is gone. Effective January 1, 2025, at 12:01 a.m., and applying to all cases pending at that time, the rule was rewritten and relettered. Rule 1.380(f) now reads:

(f) Failure to Preserve Electronically Stored Information. If electronically stored information that should have been preserved in the anticipation or conduct of litigation is lost because a party failed to take reasonable steps to preserve it, and it cannot be restored or replaced through additional discovery, the court:

(1) upon finding prejudice to another party from loss of the information, may order measures no greater than necessary to cure the prejudice; or

(2) only upon a finding that the party acted with the intent to deprive another party of the information's use in the litigation may: (A) presume that the lost information was unfavorable to the party; (B) instruct the jury that it may or must presume the information was unfavorable to the party; or (C) dismiss the action or enter a default judgment.

Three consequences follow, and they are worth understanding before you assume the video will save you.

The remedy people imagine requires intent. "They erased the tape, so the jury gets told to assume it was bad for them" is a real remedy, but the word only is in the rule. The adverse presumption, the jury instruction, and the default judgment are all gated behind a finding that the party acted with the intent to deprive you of the footage. A store whose system recorded over the file on its usual cycle is not, without more, in that category.

The trigger is the anticipation of litigation. The duty attaches to information that "should have been preserved in the anticipation or conduct of litigation." What makes a fall look like anticipated litigation, from the outside, is somebody saying so — which is the entire reason step 5 is on the checklist, and the reason a dated email outperforms a conversation at the customer service desk.

Nobody can tell you how long you have. You will find confident claims that footage is kept 30 days, or seven, or until the drive fills. Retention is set property by property and is not published anywhere you can check. Treat every number you read, including any you might have read on this site before today, as unverified. The honest instruction is simply: ask immediately, in writing.

Nobody's PIP Pays for This

Floridians absorb the car crash rules first, then apply them to every injury. It does not transfer, and the mistake costs people real money.

Florida PIP exists under Fla. Stat. § 627.736, and by the statute's own words it covers bodily injury "arising out of the ownership, maintenance, or use of a motor vehicle." A fall in a supermarket aisle involves no motor vehicle. So there is no $10,000 of no-fault medical coverage standing by, and the 14-day treatment rule does not apply to you — a point worth knowing precisely because so much Florida injury advice assumes it does.

What actually pays, in rough order: your own health insurance; any medical payments coverage the property happens to carry, which is usually small and is not an admission of anything; or, if you are uninsured, treatment under a letter of protection. That last route is not free, and what a jury is later allowed to hear about those bills is governed by a 2023 statute that reshaped this area. We cover the mechanics in what a Florida slip and fall claim is actually worth.

When They Mop It Up Ten Minutes Later

A near-universal instinct after a fall is that the cleanup proves the point: they knew it was dangerous, look, they fixed it. Florida evidence law says close to the opposite.

Under Fla. Stat. § 90.407, evidence of measures taken after an injury — measures that, if taken beforehand, would have made the injury less likely — is not admissible to prove negligence, a product defect, or culpable conduct in connection with the event. The rule does not exclude that evidence when it is offered for another purpose, such as proving ownership, control, or the feasibility of precautionary measures if those are disputed, or for impeachment.

The practical translation: the mop, the new mat, and the yellow cone that appears after your fall are not the evidence you think they are. The evidence is the condition as it existed before anyone responded — which exists only if you photographed it, or if the footage survives. Two of the three most valuable things you can do in the first hour are on the checklist above for this reason alone.

If You Fell on Government Property

A fall at a city park, a county library, a public school, a government building, or a public hospital is not the same claim, and the difference is procedural rather than factual.

Fla. Stat. § 768.28 requires that, before suit, the claim be presented in writing to the appropriate agency and — except as to a municipality, a county, or the Florida Space Authority — also to the Department of Financial Services, and that the claim be denied in writing. Failure of the agency or the Department to make final disposition within six months is deemed a final denial. Presentment is a condition precedent: skip it and the case does not get to be heard on its merits, no matter how good the facts are. There are also limits on what a government defendant can be made to pay that do not apply to a private business. If the property that hurt you is public, that is a reason to get advice in weeks, not months.

The Deadlines, in the Order They Actually Bite

The two-year period is the one everyone quotes; it is also the least urgent thing on the list. Florida shortened the general negligence limitations period from four years to two in the 2023 civil remedies act, CS/CS/HB 837, approved by the Governor on March 24, 2023 and applying to causes of action accruing after that date. Claims against government defendants run on their own track. Ask a lawyer about your specific deadline rather than counting on a number from a blog, this one included.

Four Things That Quietly Damage a Claim

Guessing on a recorded statement. The adjuster's call comes fast and sounds friendly. The questions that matter are about speed, attention, footwear, and whether you saw a sign — every one of them aimed at comparative fault. Under Fla. Stat. § 768.81 your damages drop by your share of fault, and a party found more than 50 percent at fault for their own harm recovers nothing. An honest guess that turns out wrong is worth more to the other side than a lie, because it looks like candor right up until the video contradicts it.

Posting about it. The photograph of you at a barbecue three days later does not show the six hours you spent lying down afterward. It will still be shown to the jury.

Washing the shoes. Sole tread and whatever is still on it can answer the footwear argument before it is made. Bag them and leave them alone.

Assuming you have no case because you were clumsy. Being partly at fault is not disqualifying in Florida — it is arithmetic. Whether you should have been looking where you were going is a separate question from whether a business let a hazard sit long enough that it should have known. Both can be true, and you can still recover. Where your own status on the property affects the duty owed to you at all, we cover that in invitee, licensee, or trespasser.

Common Questions

Sources

Every legal claim on this page traces to a primary source. Verify any of it yourself:

• In re: Amendments to Florida Rules of Civil Procedure, No. SC2023-0962 (Fla.), corrected opinion December 5, 2024 — rule 1.380(f), effective January 1, 2025
• In re: Amendments to the Florida Rules of Civil Procedure—Electronic Discovery, No. SC11-1542 (Fla. July 5, 2012) — the superseded rule 1.380(e) safe harbor
• Fla. Stat. § 768.0755 (2026) — Premises liability for transitory foreign substances in a business establishment (Florida Senate)
• Fla. Stat. § 768.0755 (2024) — Florida Senate
• Fla. Stat. § 90.407 — Subsequent remedial measures (2024 Florida Statutes, chapter 90, Florida Senate)
• Fla. Stat. § 90.407 — Online Sunshine
• Fla. Stat. § 627.736 (2024) — Required personal injury protection benefits (Florida Senate)
• Fla. Stat. § 627.736 — Online Sunshine (2026 Florida Statutes)
• Fla. Stat. § 768.28 (2025) — Waiver of sovereign immunity; presentment of claims (Florida Senate)
• Fla. Stat. § 768.81 (2025) — Comparative fault (Florida Senate)
• Fla. Stat. § 95.11 (2026) — Limitations other than for the recovery of real property (Florida Senate)
• CS/CS/HB 837 (2023) — Civil Remedies, approved by the Governor March 24, 2023 (Florida Senate bill history)

Rules of procedure are amended by Court opinion and statutory subsection numbering can change between legislative sessions; the citations above reflect the rules and statutes as published and current as of September 2026. No source publishes how long any particular property retains surveillance footage, and this article deliberately does not estimate one. Whether a claim exists, what deadline governs it, and how fault would be apportioned all depend on facts specific to the property and the incident. This article is general information about Florida law, not legal advice, and reading it does not create an attorney-client relationship.