Injured at a New Hampshire Business? Premises Liability Basics

A Business's Duty to Customers

New Hampshire businesses owe their customers a duty of reasonable care to maintain safe premises. That includes addressing hazards like spills, uneven flooring, poor lighting, broken handrails, falling merchandise, and inadequate security within a reasonable time, and warning of dangers that are not obvious.

When a business breaches that duty and a customer is injured as a result, the business may be liable for the harm. The injuries from these incidents — falls in particular — can be serious, especially for older customers, and the resulting claims deserve to be taken seriously.

The Knowledge Requirement

The heart of most premises cases is whether the business knew or should have known about the hazard and failed to fix it. A spill an employee created, or one that sat long enough that staff should have noticed and cleaned it, supports a claim. A hazard that appeared moments before, with no reasonable chance to address it, generally does not.

Proving the business's knowledge often depends on evidence that disappears quickly: surveillance footage, inspection and cleaning logs, witness accounts, and the condition itself. Documenting the scene immediately and reporting the incident to the business creates a record before that evidence is gone.

Comparative Fault and Recovery

Businesses routinely argue the customer was careless — not watching, wearing the wrong shoes, ignoring a warning. Under New Hampshire's comparative negligence rule, that argument reduces recovery and, past the 51% bar, eliminates it. Strong documentation of the hazard and the business's failure to address it is the best protection for an injured visitor's claim.