Premises liability; Kandil-Elsayed v F&E Oil, Inc; Tenant’s slip & fall; Duty owed to an invitee; Open & obvious; Ambs v Family Counseling & Shelter Servs of Monroe Cnty, Inc (Unpub); Causation

The court held that there were genuine issues of material fact as to whether defendant-landlord (NOM) breached the duty it owed plaintiff-tenant (Murray) as an invitee, and as to causation. Thus, it concluded the trial court erred in granting NOM summary disposition of Murray’s premises liability claim arising from her slip and fall from a porch that lacked a handrail on one side of the stairs. Murray asserted that NOM breached its duty to her “by failing to keep the handrails in good repair” while NOM contended it did not owe a “duty to have handrails on the porch in the first place, so the fallen handrail did not have to be kept in reasonable repair. A jury must decide whether a defendant’s conduct fell below the general standard of care,” and as a result, “the trial court erred by deciding that summary disposition was warranted based upon the analysis of duty.” The court found that it “further erred by relying on the legal analysis in Ambs regarding open-and-obvious conditions after our Supreme Court overturned that analysis in Kandil-Elsayed.” As to the issue of causation, “Murray testified during her deposition that she does not know why she slipped, but as she was falling she tried to grab the missing handrailing on the side of the porch to arrest her fall.” The court noted that while this “assertion of causation is circumstantial, what constitutes a question for the trier of fact in open-and-obvious premises-liability disputes has shifted since” Kandil-Elsayed was issued. “Seemingly, once it is established that a property owner owes a duty and a plaintiff has been injured, everything from breach, to causation, to comparative negligence is reserved for the jury so long as the plaintiff has provided some evidence supporting those elements.” There was a genuine issue of material fact here because Murray claimed “she would not have fallen, or at least not have fallen to the degree she did, if the handrail had been in place, so summary disposition pursuant to MCR 2.116(C)(10) was not warranted.” Reversed and remanded.