Our client was a guest at a major South Florida beach resort with his wife and four children when he learned that children had drowned in one of the hotel's pools. Frantic to locate his own children, he rushed barefoot down a resort stairway near the pool area. On the second step down, he slipped and fell the remaining ten steps, landing hard and dislocating his shoulder and injuring his back. The liability picture in this case was challenging from the start -- no witnesses, delayed reporting, no contemporaneous photographs, and a defense engineering expert who testified that the stairway material was designed for wet pool environments. Under Florida's post-2023 tort reform, a plaintiff found more than 50% at fault cannot recover anything. Despite those headwinds, Mausner Group negotiated a settlement of $200,000.
This was a case where the facts were imperfect but the result mattered. A hotel that surrounds guests with multiple pools and wet walkways has a heightened obligation to ensure its stairways are safe for the foreseeable reality that guests will traverse those stairs barefoot and in a hurry. Mausner Group built the case around the totality of the circumstances, countered the engineering expert's opinions with the factual reality of the conditions, and leveraged the damages to push the defense well above their initial position. Results in hard cases are part of what Mausner Group does.
