In most fall cases, the single best piece of evidence is a video you never see — the store's own surveillance footage showing the hazard, how long it sat there, and how you actually fell. It's powerful, it's objective, and it is almost always gone within days, recorded over on a loop or quietly deleted once a business realizes someone got hurt. The race to preserve that footage often decides the case before anyone talks about a settlement.
I'm Scott DeSalvo, and for almost 30 years premises cases have been part of my DuPage County work. If you fell in a Wood Dale store, restaurant, parking lot, or apartment complex along Irving Park Road or Wood Dale Road, here's how these cases really work — and the consultation is free.
A written preservation demand, sent fast, is what stops a business from letting its cameras overwrite the one recording that proves your case. Left alone, that footage disappears on a cycle measured in days, sometimes hours. The same goes for the physical hazard itself: the spill gets mopped, the ice gets salted, the broken step gets fixed — all before anyone documents it. Getting a lawyer involved quickly is often the difference between provable and he-said-she-said.
If you already took photos and got a witness name at the scene, you're ahead. If you didn't, don't assume the case is lost — but call soon, because the clock on that video is already running.
In Illinois, a property owner isn't automatically responsible just because you were hurt on their property. You have to show they knew, or reasonably should have known, about the danger and failed to fix it or warn you — what lawyers call "notice." How long the hazard existed, whether it was a repeat problem, and what the cameras captured all go to proving notice, and all of it rests on evidence that fades fast.
Given our winters, many Wood Dale falls happen on ice — and Illinois has a rule that surprises people. Generally, an owner isn't liable for ice that formed naturally from the weather. But if the owner made it worse — plowing snow into a pile that refroze across a walkway, letting a downspout drain onto a sidewalk, or leaving pavement that traps and freezes water — that unnatural accumulation can support a claim. Whether the ice was natural or man-made can decide the whole case.
The insurer's strategy is to make "slip and fall" sound trivial, then comb your history for any old ache to argue the fall changed nothing. But a fall can mean a broken hip, a shattered wrist, a torn shoulder, or a head injury with lasting effects — the kind of harm that leads to surgery and lost work. Illinois law lets you recover your medical bills past and future, your lost income and reduced earning ability, your physical pain, and the loss of your normal life.
Bottom line: a fall you're tempted to shrug off can become the most disruptive injury of your life — get treated, document everything, and don't let an insurer decide it was nothing.
The surveillance video is overwriting itself right now, so please don't wait. Call me, walk me through where and how you fell, and I'll give you a straight read on whether the notice and fault picture supports a case. If it does, we move at once to preserve the proof. It's free, and you pay nothing unless I win for you.
I'm available any time, day or night. Call 312-500-4500.
Falls are just one kind of injury I handle. For everything else, see my Wood Dale Personal Injury Attorney page.
Only if we move fast. Surveillance systems overwrite on a short cycle, and once a business knows someone was hurt, the relevant footage can disappear. A preservation demand sent quickly is often what saves it — which is why calling soon after a fall matters so much, even before you've decided whether to pursue anything.
Generally two years from the date of your fall against a private owner. But a fall on public or government property — a village sidewalk, a park district lot, a public building — can carry special notice rules and much shorter deadlines, sometimes about a year. Those government deadlines are easy to miss, so reach out as soon as you can.
It depends on whether the ice was natural or man-made. Illinois usually doesn't hold owners responsible for naturally accumulated ice, but if they created the hazard — refrozen plow piles, a draining downspout, or defective pavement — you may have a strong claim. It's a technical line and the one insurers fight on, so it helps to have someone who can prove an unnatural accumulation.
Not necessarily. Illinois uses modified comparative negligence, so being partly at fault doesn't end your claim unless you were more than half responsible — your recovery is just reduced by your share. Insurers always push to get you past that line, and countering it is a central part of what I do.
Nothing out of pocket. I take these on contingency — my fee comes only from what I recover for you, and if there's no recovery, you owe nothing. I also front the investigation costs, like securing camera footage and expert analysis. You never pay me to get started.
Scott DeSalvo founded DeSalvo Law to help injured people throughout Chicago and surrounding suburbs. Licensed to practice law in Illinois since 1998, IARDC #6244452, Scott has represented over 3,000 clients in personal injury, workers compensation, and accident cases.
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