Fell on a Wet Floor at a Maryland Business? The State's Top Court Says "We Were Getting the Sign" Is Not a Defense
A fall on a slick floor sounds minor until you see what it does to people. A hip fracture in an older adult, a head striking tile, a wrist or shoulder that needs surgery, a back injury that never fully settles down: injuries like these often start with a few seconds on a wet floor inside a store, a dealership, an office lobby, or a medical building.
Maryland law has long made these cases hard to win. But on September 25, 2026, the Supreme Court of Maryland closed off one of the defenses businesses use most: the claim that they simply did not have enough time to warn anyone. The case is DARCARS Toyota of Silver Spring v. Blackwell.
Why fall cases in Maryland usually turn on "notice"
A customer in a business is what the law calls an invitee, and a business owes its invitees the highest duty Maryland recognizes: reasonable care to keep the premises safe, and to fix or warn about dangers it knows about or should discover. But a business is not an insurer. Being hurt on the property is not enough by itself.
The fight in most cases is over what the business knew and when. If a hazard was created by a customer or someone else, the injured person usually has to prove the business knew about it, or that it sat there long enough that a careful business would have found it. That "time on the floor" proof is often impossible to come by, and many Maryland fall cases have been lost on it. (We explained that problem in more detail in our earlier post on building the notice case in Maryland store falls.)
What happened in DARCARS
A customer was waiting in a car dealership's lounge for an oil change. A service advisor noticed footprints near the service desk and asked a coworker to mop them up. The coworker mopped without putting out a wet-floor sign, then walked away to get one, which by his account was about a minute away. Before he got back, the same service advisor who had watched the mopping called the customer up to the desk because her car was ready. She walked across the wet floor, slipped, and fell. No one warned her.
The trial court threw the case out, reasoning that the dealership did not have enough time after the floor got wet to put up the sign. The Appellate Court of Maryland disagreed, and the Supreme Court of Maryland affirmed, sending the case back so a jury can decide it.
What the Supreme Court of Maryland held
The Court made two points that matter for anyone hurt in a fall at a Maryland business.
First, when the business's own employee creates the hazard, the business is treated as knowing about it. The injured person does not have to prove how long the danger was there or that someone reported it. Notice, the Court said, is simply not an issue when an owner's employee knowingly creates the hazard, whether on purpose or by accident.
Second, "we didn't have time" is the wrong question. The dealership relied on an older case, Rehn v. Westfield America, in which a restaurant worker learned of a spill a customer had made and had no chance to clean it up before someone slipped. The Court explained why that case does not apply here. The restaurant worker could not act until she learned of a hazard someone else created. The dealership's employee, by contrast, was the one who made the floor wet. When creating a hazard is a foreseeable part of an assigned job like mopping, the business can plan ahead: put the sign out first, block off the area, or warn people walking toward it. Whether the business took reasonable steps is a question for the jury unless the evidence allows only one reasonable answer.
Applying that to the facts, the Court noted that the floor was right in front of the service desk, where customers were expected to walk; no sign went out before or during mopping; the wet floor was left unattended; and an employee who knew it was wet called the customer over without a word. A jury could find that a reasonable business would have done better.
How Maryland compares with D.C. and Virginia
Here is how the three jurisdictions treat a hazard created by the business itself.
| Question | Maryland | District of Columbia | Virginia |
|---|---|---|---|
| The business's own employee created the hazard. Does the injured person still have to prove the business knew about it? | No. The knowledge requirement is satisfied, and whether the business took reasonable precautions is usually for the jury (DARCARS, 2026). | No. Creating the dangerous condition puts the business on notice by itself (Greene v. Children's National Medical Center, 2024). | A store must remove hazards it placed on its floors, and where its own conduct creates a foreseeable risk, it must use reasonable care to prevent the danger in the first place (Memco Stores v. Yeatman, 1986). |
| Can the injured person's own carelessness defeat the claim? | Yes. Maryland follows contributory negligence. | Yes. D.C. follows contributory negligence in fall cases. | Yes. Virginia follows contributory negligence. |
| General deadline to file an injury lawsuit | 3 years | 3 years | 2 years |
In D.C., the Court of Appeals reached a similar result in Greene v. Children's National Medical Center (D.C. Oct. 3, 2024), where a visitor slipped on water a hospital custodian's floor-scrubbing machine left behind, with no warning signs. Because a jury could find the hospital's own employee created the hazard, she did not have to make any further showing of notice. In Virginia, the Supreme Court of Virginia's decision in Memco Stores, Inc. v. Yeatman, 232 Va. 50 (1986), upheld a verdict for a shopper who slipped on leaves shed by a plant the store had displayed beside an aisle, rejecting the store's argument that she had to prove it actually knew the leaves were on the floor in time to remove them.
The filing deadlines come from Md. Code, Cts. & Jud. Proc. § 5-101, D.C. Code § 12-301, and Va. Code § 8.01-243. Shorter notice requirements can apply when the property belongs to a government, so do not assume the general deadline is the one that controls. And because all three jurisdictions follow the harsh contributory negligence rule, how the fall happened matters a great deal; our primer on contributory negligence in D.C., Maryland, and Virginia explains why.
What this means if you were seriously hurt in a fall in Maryland
DARCARS makes the origin of the hazard one of the most important facts in a Maryland fall case. If a worker was mopping, waxing, stocking, setting up a display, or running a cleaning machine, the business cannot fall back on "we didn't know" or "we didn't have time." The question becomes whether it acted reasonably, and that is a question a jury gets to answer.
A few practical points:
- Who made the floor wet, and when, is the key fact. Note anything you saw or heard: a mop or bucket, a cleaning machine, an employee who had just been in the area, someone saying a sign was on the way.
- The absence of a warning matters. If there was no sign, cone, or verbal warning, that is worth remembering and writing down as soon as you can.
- Much of the proof belongs to the business. Surveillance video, cleaning assignments, and incident reports are in the business's hands, and video in particular is often recorded over on a routine schedule.
- Your own conduct will be examined. Because Maryland bars recovery when the injured person's own negligence contributed to the fall, expect the business to argue you should have seen the hazard. A ruling like DARCARS, which focuses on what the business did and failed to do, is an important counterweight.
Talk to a Maryland premises liability lawyer
If you or a family member suffered a serious injury in a fall at a business in Maryland, D.C., or Virginia, call Posey Lebowitz at (202) 524-0123 or reach us through our contact form for a free consultation.
This post is general information, not legal advice about your case.
