Las Vegas Premises Liability Attorneys

One of the most common things an injured person is told is some version of: “The hazard was right there, you should have seen it, so this is your fault.” On many premises cases, the defense leans hard on the open-and-obvious doctrine, and the framing is meant to make you believe your claim is over before it starts.

It is usually not over. In Foster v. Costco, the Nevada Supreme Court held that the open and obvious nature of a dangerous condition does not automatically relieve a landowner from the general duty of reasonable care. Obviousness bears on whether the owner exercised reasonable care, and your own failure to protect yourself from a danger you could see goes to your share of the fault. It is not a no-duty rule that ends the claim by itself. Foster reversed a summary judgment for the store and sent the case back, leaving whether the hazard was obvious, whether the store acted reasonably, and whether the shopper protected himself for the factfinder. It did not decide that the store was liable.

That distinction matters because of how the other side uses it. Treated as a complete defense, “open and obvious” becomes a lever to push for summary judgment: getting a judge to throw the case out before a jury ever weighs the facts. Knowing that Nevada law treats it as part of the reasonableness and fault questions rather than an automatic bar is often the difference between a claim that survives and one that is pressured into going away cheaply.

A full treatment of how this plays out (including the distraction and foreseeability arguments) lives in our explainer on the open-and-obvious doctrine in a slip-and-fall case. What actually counts as a dangerous condition in the first place is covered in what constitutes a hazardous condition.

If you were hurt because another person attacked you (a beating in a parking garage, an assault outside a bar, a shooting at an apartment complex), your claim runs on a different track than a slip on a wet floor. This is sometimes called negligent security, and it turns on foreseeability rather than the hazard-condition rules above. Where the property is a hotel, motel, or similar lodging, Nevada has a specific statute, NRS 651.015, and it limits rather than expands an innkeeper’s liability for a third party’s criminal act: the owner is liable for the death or injury of a person on the premises caused by someone who is not its employee only if the wrongful act was foreseeable and the owner failed to exercise due care or to take reasonable precautions against it; under the statute the act is not foreseeable unless the owner failed to exercise due care for the safety of patrons, or prior incidents of similar wrongful acts occurred on the premises and the owner had notice or knowledge of them; and the court decides as a matter of law whether the act was foreseeable and whether that duty to take precautions existed. For other properties (an apartment complex, a bar, a parking garage), the question comes from general negligence law rather than that statute: a proprietor owes invited guests ordinary care, and a duty to take affirmative steps against a third person’s wrongful act arises where there is reasonable cause to anticipate such acts and the probability of injury from them (Early v. N.L.V. Casino Corp., 100 Nev. 200, 678 P.2d 683 (1984); Doud v. Las Vegas Hilton Corp., 109 Nev. 1096, 864 P.2d 796 (1993)). Which framework a court would use for a particular property is worth asking your attorney about.

The central question is the same either way: should the property have anticipated the risk and taken reasonable security measures? In Humphries v. New York-New York Hotel & Casino, 133 Nev. 607, 403 P.3d 358 (2017), the Nevada Supreme Court held that a beating on the casino floor was foreseeable based on the casino’s notice or knowledge of prior incidents of similar wrongful acts, so the casino owed a duty of care. The court reversed the summary judgment the casino had won and sent the case back; it did not find the casino liable. It also rejected the narrower view that the venue needed notice of the specific attack that was coming, and it compared the earlier incidents by where they happened, how violent they were, and the security concerns they raised. So “similar” does not mean identical to what happened to you.

Two points the other side would rather you not know:

This is hub-level framing; the foreseeability proof and the security-specific evidence are developed on the casino injury page and the bouncer assault and excessive-force page.

Insurance adjusters often imply that because you were partly responsible, you cannot recover. That overstates the rule. Nevada uses modified comparative negligence under NRS 41.141: your own negligence does not bar recovery as long as it is not greater than the negligence of the parties you are suing. Practitioners commonly describe this as the 51% bar: if your share of fault crosses into “greater than” the other side’s combined share, recovery is cut off.

Two details that the framing usually leaves out, and that change the math in your favor:

A note on language: the statute itself says “not greater than” and does not contain a literal “51%” figure: that number is the shorthand lawyers use, not a quotation from the law.

Premises claims are defended by insurers and corporate risk departments who do this every day. Knowing their moves ahead of time is part of protecting your claim: