Can You Sue a Gym for Injuries?
Yes, you can sue a gym for injuries if faulty equipment or negligence by the owner or staff caused or contributed to your injuries. If you were injured by faulty equipment, you may also be able to sue the manufacturer. Even if you signed a liability waiver when you joined the gym, you may still be able to file a gym injury lawsuit. Our award-winning gym injury lawyers can investigate your accident, build a case against the gym, and recover substantial compensation on your behalf.
- Examples of Gym Negligence Leading to Injuries
- Who Can Be Liable in a Gym Injury Lawsuit?
- What Damages Can You Recover in a Gym Accident?
- What If You Signed a Waiver?
- How Can Hiring an Attorney Help Your Case?
- Why Trust Cutter Law Attorneys to Handle Your Case?
- Schedule Your Free Gym Accident Consultation Today
Examples of Gym Negligence Leading to Injuries
Gyms pose a myriad of hazards, such as heavy weights, equipment with moving parts, slippery surfaces, and members with varying skill levels. Gym owners have a legal duty to provide a safe environment free of unreasonable hazards. This duty includes ensuring the layout is safe, maintaining equipment to safe standards, and properly training staff in safety and emergency protocols.
The following conditions can put gym members at risk and may constitute negligence if an injury occurs:
- Failure to ensure equipment is safe and free of defects
- Failure to repair equipment with worn cables, belts, or handles
- Failure to require members to wipe their sweat off of machines after use
- Failure to monitor and remove equipment, cords, and other trip hazardsÂ
- Failure to clean up wet or slippery areas on floors
- The wrong types of fitness equipment placed too close together
- Poorly trained staff who give bad advice to patrons
- Lack of appropriate supervision during workouts
How Gym Negligence Causes Injuries
When staff or trainers instruct you to perform exercises improperly, you could severely strain or pull a muscle. You could even drop weights on your foot, lap, or head. When staff fails to keep the exercise area free of clutter and clean up spills promptly, patrons and other employees are in danger of slips and falls. Slipping and falling in a weight room could be especially dangerous due to the potential of hitting your head on hard machinery or equipment.
These are just a few examples of the harm that can result from defective equipment or negligence by gym owners and staff.
Gym Injury Cases We've Handled at Cutter Law
$280,000
Against a 24-Hour Fitness and a workout machine company. Our client was using a triceps machine when the cable snapped. He suffered from back pain and underwent physical therapy.
Attorney on Case: John Roussas
Confidential
Client sustained neck injuries resulting in paraplegia. Instructional placards and warnings necessary for safe operation were missing from the equipment.
Attorney on Case: John Roussas
Who Can Be Liable in a Gym Injury Lawsuit?
The gym owner can be held liable for injuries resulting from a dangerous condition they knew or should have known about and failed to address. Appropriate action could include repairing the condition, preventing customers from accessing the area around the condition, or adding warning signs.Â
The gym owner need not be present to incur liability. Owners are also liable for the negligence of their employees under California premises liability laws. In addition, you may also be able to file a claim against the following parties if they caused or contributed to your injuries:
- Equipment manufacturers and distributors
- Equipment maintenance companies
- Trainers, instructors, or coaches and their employers
- Other gym members whose carelessness caused your injury
Can You Sue a Gym for Faulty Equipment?
You may be able to sue the gym if it fails to maintain the equipment or allows worn-out equipment to remain in service, causing your injury.
Faulty exercise equipment can result in broken bones, traumatic brain injuries, spinal cord injuries, and severe soft tissue injuries. Injuries can happen when weights fall because cables break, handles break off, or weightlifters lose grip on slippery handles.Â
If the equipment arrived at the gym in a defective condition, you may still have a case against the gym for failing to notice and placing the equipment in service anyway. However, you may also have a product liability case against the product’s manufacturer, distributor, and retailer. Product liability cases work differently from other personal injury cases.Â
In most personal injury claims, you must prove negligence. However, this is not necessary for a product liability claim. You only need to prove that you were injured while using the product as expected and that at least one of the following is true:
- The equipment had a manufacturing defect.
- The equipment suffered from an inherently dangerous design.
- The manufacturer failed to provide adequate instructions or warnings.
What Damages Can You Recover in a Gym Accident?
You may be eligible for economic and non-economic damages in your gym injury lawsuit. Economic damages compensate for your verifiable monetary losses related to the accident, such as ongoing medical expenses, lost wages, and loss of future earnings.Â
Non-economic damages compensate for the subjective, non-monetary impacts on your life, such as emotional distress, pain and suffering, humiliation, and loss of society.Â
If someone injured you on purpose or through a course of conduct that displayed blatant disregard for your rights and safety, you may also be eligible to recover punitive damages.
What If You Signed a Waiver?
Signing a liability waiver does not automatically bar you from pursuing a claim. There are several circumstances in which a liability waiver is unenforceable. They include the following:
- The gym failed to provide a clear, legible copy of the signed waiver.
- You signed the waiver as a minor without your parent or guardian.
- The language of the waiver is ambiguous or unclear.
- The negligence causing your injury goes beyond ordinary negligence.
Ordinary negligence is an unintentional failure to exercise reasonable care. Conduct that goes beyond ordinary negligence includes deliberate misconduct, recklessness, or behavior so egregious that any reasonable person would have known that it would result in a high likelihood of harm.
How Can Hiring an Attorney Help Your Case?
The gym will likely have a policy from a large insurance company covering it. The insurance company will likely pull out all the stops to fight your claim and avoid paying the compensation you’re owed. Hiring an experienced Sacramento personal injury lawyer levels the playing field. Our experienced and supportive attorneys are ready to prove your claim, navigate the legal process, and aggressively pursue the maximum compensation available for your injury claim.
Investigating Your Accident
We will visit the accident site to gather evidence and investigate how your injury occurred. We will interview staff, locate eyewitnesses and interview them, obtain photographic and video evidence, and review the maintenance records of any machinery involved in your accident. We will uncover the gym’s practices and procedures to determine whether staff properly instruct patrons on using equipment and supervise exercise areas appropriately. We will look for evidence of the following:
- Defective exercise equipment
- Improperly maintained or unrepaired exercise equipment
- A pattern of allowing slippery floors and trip hazards to go unaddressed
- Worn or slippery exercise equipment
- Exercise equipment located too close together
Our investigation will tell us how your accident happened and who is responsible so we can determine whether you have a gym negligence case and who you can sue.
Assessing Your Damages
We will communicate with your doctors, examine your medical records, talk to you and your family, and hire experts to help us determine the lifetime costs of your injuries. Our experts will include life care planners, vocational specialists, and medical experts who can give us insight into your future earning capacity, your lifetime medical costs, and the degree of suffering your injuries will cause now and in the future. We will use this information to calculate your damages.
Fighting for Maximum Compensation
We will fight aggressively to ensure you receive the full measure of the damages we calculated. As experienced trial lawyers, we know what it takes to build a strong case and win in court if we must take your case to trial. The strength of our evidence and our winning reputation provide powerful leverage that often allows us to win significant settlements without going to trial.Â
Filing Your Claim on Time
California’s personal injury statute of limitations generally requires you to file your claim within two years of the accident. Gathering evidence and calculating your damages will be necessary before your claim can be filed. Therefore, contacting us as soon as possible after your accident is important to ensure you don’t miss this important deadline. If you file your lawsuit too late, the court will dismiss your case, and you will lose your right to pursue damages forever. You can count on us to file your claim on time and ensure you receive your well-deserved compensation.
Why Trust Cutter Law Attorneys to Handle Your Case?
Our award-winning gym injury attorneys have 130 years of combined experience and have recovered hundreds of millions of dollars in settlements and verdicts for injured accident victims, such as the following:
- $10.03 million slip and fall settlement
- $350,000 slip and fall settlement
As a family-owned and operated law firm, we understand how much your injury affects you and your family. Our attorneys work together on every case to ensure you get the combination of all of our strengths and feel like a welcomed member of our family.
Client service and communication mean everything to us. When you choose Cutter Law, our skilled, caring, and supportive advocates will welcome your calls 24 hours a day, seven days a week. We go out of our way to ensure you understand everything happening with your case, and our caring support will extend to your whole family.
Schedule Your Free Gym Accident Consultation Today
You have nothing to lose by contacting our caring and devoted accident lawyers. The initial consultation is free, and if we accept your case, you will get the full benefit of all of our services with no upfront cost. We collect our fees from the compensation we recover for you, and you only pay if we win. You have a limited time to file your claim, and valuable evidence can be lost if you wait too long.Â
Don’t wait to speak with our experienced gym injury lawyers. Contact us today for a free consultation.
Brooks has a long-established, respected reputation as a skilled trial attorney and a record of proven success.
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