Downtown LA Slip and Fall Lawyer

Downtown Places Where People Fall, and What Makes Each Different

Union Station

Opened in 1939 and spread across 52 acres, the station's original floors are red quarry tile with marble trim. Metro has owned it since 2011, so the six-month claim rule applies.

Metro Rail Platforms and Entrances

The A, B and E lines all run through Downtown, at stations including 7th Street/Metro Center, Pershing Square, Civic Center/Grand Park, Historic Broadway, Grand Avenue Arts/Bunker Hill and Little Tokyo/Arts District. Wet tile after rain, escalator transitions and platform edges are the recurring problems. All of it is public entity ground.

The Convention Center

Two point four million square feet across five exhibit halls and 64 meeting rooms, and the operator's own published specifications describe every exhibit hall floor as polished concrete. Add an event crowd and spilled drinks and the exposure is obvious. Note also that Pico Boulevard between Figueroa and LA Live Way has been fully closed around the clock since December 2025 for the expansion, and is scheduled to stay closed into 2028, which has redirected a great deal of foot traffic.

Crypto.com Arena

Open since 1999, privately owned and operated by AEG, with five concourses that empty at once. Event-night falls tend to involve crowd movement, spilled drinks and stair transitions rather than a static hazard.

Grand Central Market

Trading continuously since September 1917, with more than fifty individual vendor stalls in the ground floor and basement of two historic buildings. A food hall of that age and density produces exactly what you would expect: spills, grease, ice melt and produce debris, on floors that predate modern slip standards. Where more than one business shares responsibility for a walkway, working out who controlled the area is part of the case.

Sidewalks

This is the largest category Downtown and the one with the most misunderstanding attached to it, so it gets its own section below.

Sidewalk Falls, and Why the Building Owner Is Usually Not the Defendant

California's Streets and Highways Code section 5610 requires the owner of property fronting a sidewalk to maintain it. People read that and assume the building owner is liable when a pedestrian falls. Generally, they are not.

The reason is in the statute itself. The consequence of failing to repair, set out in section 5614, is that the city can do the work and recover its costs as a lien. It is a cost-recovery mechanism, not a transfer of liability to injured pedestrians. Courts have long held that imposing a new duty toward third parties would require clear and unambiguous language, and the ordinary maintenance duty does not supply it.

An abutting owner does become liable in two situations: where the owner created the hazard, and where the owner has exercised control over the public property well beyond ordinary maintenance. A useful illustration is tree roots. Where the tree sits on the owner's own land and its roots lift the sidewalk, the owner can be responsible. Where the tree is on the publicly owned strip, generally the owner is not.

Los Angeles added its own layer in 2017, a provision often described as fix and release, and the popular description of it is backwards. Under it, when the city repairs a sidewalk it issues a certificate and the maintenance obligation passes to the owner, but the twenty-year period attached to residential property is a warranty running in the owner's favor: the city guarantees the repair and is barred from issuing non-compliance notices during it. For commercial and industrial property the period is five years, not twenty. And it can end early, including where an owner asks to keep a tree the city would otherwise have removed.

The city's own controller put the liability point plainly, saying the provision does not impose any new liability on property owners owed to pedestrians injured by sidewalk defects next to their property, and that sharing liability would require clear and unambiguous legislative language. When the city's FAQ was asked directly who is liable after a certificate issues, the published answer was that there are many factors and the question cannot be answered.

How Bad Does a Sidewalk Defect Have to Be?

Defendants raise the trivial defect doctrine in almost every sidewalk case: that the height difference was too small to be a dangerous condition as a matter of law.

Content on this subject routinely quotes a range of three quarters of an inch to an inch and a half as generally trivial. That language comes from a 2019 decision, it was not the holding, and a 2023 Court of Appeal decision said directly that it exaggerates the accepted range. The more accurate statement is that courts have been reluctant to find a defect trivial once the difference begins to stretch beyond about one inch.

Size is only the first step in any event. Whether the area was well lit, whether debris obscured the defect, whether the edge was jagged, the weather, whether the person had reason to be familiar with the spot, and whether anyone else had fallen there all factor in. A three-quarter-inch lip in a dark, crowded, debris-strewn stretch is not the same case as the same lip on an empty sunlit pavement.

What the City Knows About Its Own Sidewalks

This matters because a public entity claim turns on notice, and Los Angeles has documented its position in its own audit.

The city controller's 2021 audit of sidewalk repair reported that over the previous five fiscal years the city received more than 1,700 claims and 1,020 lawsuits for sidewalk injuries and paid more than 35 million dollars in settlements, including 12 million in a single year, and characterized the ongoing cost as over 5 million dollars annually.

The same audit records at least 9,000 linear miles of sidewalk, equivalent to about 11 square miles of concrete; roughly 50,000 sidewalk reports left unaddressed; and fewer than 4,879 repair certificates issued against some 640,000 parcels. Its blunt conclusion was that the city does not know how many sidewalk locations need repair. It also recorded that a sidewalk repair request took an average of 41 days to complete with asphalt, against three business days to close a pothole request.

Behind all of this sits the Willits class action settlement, which received final court approval in August 2016 and commits the city to a thirty-year sidewalk program the city describes as 1.4 billion dollars, running to around 2046.

Cameras, and the 72-Hour Problem

Downtown is covered in cameras, and that is less helpful than it sounds.

Metro's published records retention schedule, covering activity on buses, on rail cars and at stations and facilities, states that tape is overwritten every 72 hours and that only the portion of a recording reported as an incident is preserved, for two years. That schedule is an older published version and should be read as Metro's stated policy rather than a guarantee of current practice, but the direction is unambiguous: if nobody reports the incident, there may be nothing to retrieve within days.

There is a second problem people do not anticipate. Metro's own policy states that no division or department may release a copy of an audio or visual surveillance record to any third party. A public records request will not produce the footage. The route to it is a preservation demand followed by discovery in a filed case, which is a further reason not to let a claim sit.

Private venues Downtown publish no retention policy at all. Not the Convention Center, not the arena. Retention is internal policy, the periods are commonly short, and anyone quoting you a specific number for a private building is guessing.

Where evidence that should have been preserved is destroyed, California allows a jury to be told it may infer the evidence would have been unfavorable to the party that destroyed it. That is a remedy for a problem, not a substitute for the footage.

What You Have to Prove

Against a private owner, California asks whether the owner used reasonable care in managing the property, considering how foreseeable the harm was and how burdensome a precaution would have been. The old categories of invitee and licensee no longer decide the question.

Notice is the real fight. Where the owner or an employee created the hazard, notice is assumed. Otherwise you have to show the condition existed long enough that reasonable care would have found and fixed it, and the leading California decision allows that to be shown through the absence of inspection: if no inspection was made within a reasonable period before the fall, a jury may infer the condition had been there long enough.

Against a public entity, the claim runs under Government Code section 835 and requires a dangerous condition, causation, a foreseeable risk of that kind of injury, and either that an employee created the condition, in which case notice does not matter, or that the entity had actual or constructive notice with time to act.

On obvious hazards, a condition being visible does not automatically end a claim. It can remove the duty to warn while leaving the duty to fix in place, particularly where people have no practical choice but to encounter it.

Being partly at fault reduces a recovery rather than defeating it.

The Deadlines, Stated Precisely

Against a private owner, two years from the fall under Code of Civil Procedure section 335.1.

Against a public entity, a written claim generally has to be presented within six months under Government Code section 911.2. Two details are commonly stated wrongly. The six months runs from when the claim accrues rather than automatically from the date you fell. And the 25 dollar fee mentioned in that section is the state's; the City of Los Angeles charges nothing to present a claim.

Claims against the City of Los Angeles are filed online or delivered to the City Clerk at 200 North Spring Street; the city states that emailed and faxed claims are not accepted. Metro requires its own paper claim within six months and states that claims received by email will be rejected.

One further trap: if the claim exceeds 10,000 dollars, Government Code section 910 requires you not to state a dollar amount on the form. People fill that box in routinely.

If the six months has passed there is a late claim application, generally within a year, but it is an application rather than an entitlement, and a claimant being a minor does not extend that year.

After a claim is rejected in writing you generally have six months to sue. Counterintuitively, if the entity never responds at all, no written rejection is mailed and the period to sue is two years from accrual rather than six months. Silence can be more generous than a rejection letter, which is not a reason to rely on it.

Where a Downtown Case Is Filed

Downtown matters belong in the Central District of Los Angeles Superior Court. The Stanley Mosk Courthouse at 111 North Hill Street houses the civil filing window, complex civil filings, civil records and civil judgments, and is where these cases are handled.

Worth noting that departments at Mosk were renumbered in May 2026, so older guidance naming specific departments is out of date. For Los Angeles more broadly, the court moved away from a central personal injury hub in October 2022 and now assigns cases by the district where the incident occurred; Downtown is one of the places where that still means Mosk.

Legal Disclaimer

This page is provided by Etehad Law for general information only and is not legal advice. Reading it does not create an attorney-client relationship. The attorney responsible for this communication is Simon P. Etehad, Esq. (California State Bar No. 186449), Etehad Law, Beverly Hills, California. Prior results do not guarantee a similar outcome.