Most people don’t think about sustaining an injury when they walk into a museum. They’re not normally particularly dangerous places. However, it’s also true that an injury can happen at any time. Maybe you’ll get unlucky and you will sustain an injury in this relatively unlikely locale.
You’ll likely need to hire a lawyer following a museum injury if you feel that you can blame someone other than yourself. You may have just cause to do so in some circumstances.
You should know a few things about museum injuries. We will talk about them in detail right now.
What Do You Call It if You Sue a Museum Following an Injury?
If you hurt yourself in a museum, and you feel that you can sue the facility in the aftermath, then that’s a personal injury lawsuit. It’s a kind of civil action. That’s different from a situation where you suspect criminality or where the legal system alleges that someone broke the law.
You can also call such a lawsuit a premises liability case. That is a particular niche or subsection of personal injury law.
Some lawyers or law firms make this kind of case their specialty, just like some handle mostly car crashes or medical malpractice lawsuits. If you injure yourself in a museum, and you feel that you can blame the facility and not your own behavior, then that falls into the same category of lawsuit as if you injured yourself inside a grocery store, a furniture store, or just about any other similar location that comes to mind.
What Kinds of Situations Most Often Cause Museum Injuries?
Frankly, if you hurt yourself in a museum, then more times than not, you probably caused the injury yourself through some sort of unsafe action. For instance, maybe you entered an exhibit and wanted to take some funny videos or pictures with your smartphone for one of your social media accounts.
By entering the exhibit, you make it unlikely that you can successfully sue the museum and win your lawsuit. A jury will probably conclude, and rightly so, that a reasonable person would know not to enter a museum exhibit unless signage specifically said that they could.
If you slip on a wet patch in a museum because someone mopped the floor and did not put a warning sign up, that is the kind of thing where you could potentially sue the building’s management and win. If something suspended in the air fell on you because a wire snapped, causing an injury, you might file a lawsuit against the museum and win in that instance as well.
How Much Might You Collect if You Successfully Sue a Museum?
It is hard to say how much money in damages you might collect if you decide to sue a museum after an incident where you hurt yourself. Usually, the answer comes from how much damage the injury did.
If you sustained a serious concussion from something from an exhibit falling and hitting you in the head, and you suffer headaches and dizziness for months afterward, the museum might settle with you for six figures. If you sustained an even more serious injury, though, such as if you lost a limb due to a museum-related accident, that might get you seven figures.
Keep in mind, though, that you will still need to pay your lawyer if you successfully sue the museum and collect some money. That will usually cost you anywhere from 30%-40% of your winnings.
How to Increase Your Chances of Getting Money from a Museum Injury
If you want to increase your chances of successfully suing a museum if you injured yourself there, you need to hire the right lawyer. A personal injury attorney who knows all about these sorts of premises liability lawsuits can help you to get the largest settlement amount or amount of money from a jury’s verdict.
It might also help if you took some smartphone video or pictures right after the accident. If the video or pictures show your injury and the circumstances that caused it, that might look particularly damning to a jury, assuming the lawsuit ever gets that far.
If you get up on the witness stand and explain how this injury impacted your life, that might also get you more money in damages. If you appear sympathetic to the jury and they can easily put themselves in your shoes, then that’s a point in your favor.
