By: Benjamin DiBlasi
In Reyes v. Walmart Inc., 2025 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 110758, Plaintiff filed a lawsuit over an alleged slip-and-fall at a Walmart located in Niles, Illinois. The fall occurred just three to four steps from the cash register. Nobody, including Plaintiff and her husband, ever actually saw the alleged liquid. Plaintiff claimed that she only felt it after she fell. None of Walmart’s employees reported seeing liquid on the floor, and Plaintiff did not see them cleaning anything off the floor.
Central to the case was a three-minute surveillance video in which Plaintiff’s fall was captured. The video was grainy and shot from a far distance. As such, the video does not show any liquid on the floor. However, it did show approximately twelve customers walking over the area where Plaintiff fell without incident. It also shows two employees cautiously approaching and inspecting the area about fifteen seconds after the fall. There was nothing captured that showed the formation of a liquid.
Walmart’s policy required its employees to walk through the store every hour to an hour and a half to inspect their floors. Cashier employees were also responsible for inspecting the area on a daily basis. Their policy also called for more employees to be present when foot traffic was higher.
Walmart filed a motion for summary judgment on both counts of Plaintiff’s complaint: Premises Liability (Count I) and Negligence (Count II). For the premises liability claim, Walmart first argued that because there was no evidence of liquid on the floor, Plaintiff could not establish proximate cause. However, based on Plaintiff’s testimony that she felt liquid after she fell, the Court found that there was enough circumstantial evidence for Plaintiff to refute this argument.
The second argument of premises liability was that Walmart did not have actual or constructive notice of the alleged spill. Plaintiff only argued that Walmart had constructive notice of the alleged spill. Plaintiff asserted that the liquid was present for a sufficient amount of time for Walmart’s employees to have discovered it. Based on the three-minute video, Plaintiff argued that the liquid would have been present for at least three minutes. She also argued that this was a heavily trafficked area, which heightened Walmart’s duty to inspect the area.
The court rejected Plaintiff’s contention that three minutes was long enough for Walmart to have had constructive notice of the liquid. Accordingly, the court granted Walmart’s motion for summary judgment on the premises liability claim.
With regard to the negligence claim, the court found that Walmart had not breached its duty owed to Plaintiff. Although a duty was owed to Plaintiff, there was only limited circumstantial evidence that there was even a liquid present for Walmart to have cleaned up. There was also no evidence of any issues with Walmart’s inspection policy to show a breach. As such, Walmart was entitled to summary judgment on this claim as well.
Federal courts in the Seventh Circuit have consistently held that the presence of a hazardous substance on a floor for less than ten minutes is seldom long enough for the landowner to be considered to have constructive notice of its existence. The three-minute window in Reyes is certainly one of the shortest.