Providence Stairway Fall Attorneys

Stairway falls produce the worst injuries in premises law and the most frustrating legal outcomes, because the answer is so often that the stairs are legal. Providence is a city of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century buildings, and Rhode Island does not force old buildings to be rebuilt to today’s standards. Understanding where that defense stops is the whole exercise. At Jeffrey Glassman Injury Lawyers, our slip and fall attorneys handle stairway falls in Providence. Our Rhode Island office is located at 285 Main Street in Woonsocket.

Rhode Island’s building code is not retroactive, and the state says so about as clearly as a regulation can. The rehabilitation code governing existing structures provides that nothing in the code shall be interpreted as requiring the repair, renovation, alteration, or reconstruction of existing buildings. Its stated purpose is to encourage the continued use or reuse of existing buildings, and compliance obligations attach only when an owner voluntarily undertakes repair, renovation, alteration, reconstruction, addition or a change of occupancy. The statutory framework says the same thing: existing structures must be brought into conformity when altered, renovated, reconstructed, repaired, or when a change of use occurs.

Rhode Island’s Supreme Court has applied that in an injury case. A plaintiff fell down three concrete steps leaving a front door and sued over the absence of a handrail. Although a state building code in effect when the home was built required handrails on such stairways, the residence was grandfathered, and a handrail the owner had briefly installed years later for his elderly mother was temporary and non-compliant and so did not trigger current regulations. The Court found no duty, describing the connection between the injury and the absence of a handrail as too far attenuated, and declining to impose prophylactic measures beyond code requirements.

That case gets cited on every Rhode Island stairway claim. Expect it.

Grandfathering is narrower than defendants make it sound, and there are four ways through it.

Work triggers the code. Grandfathering protects a building until the owner does something. A renovation, a change of occupancy, a conversion of a two-family to apartments, a rebuilt porch, or a replaced stair pulls the work into current requirements. That makes the permit history the central document in an older-building case. What was done, when, under what permit, and did the stair fall inside the scope?

Grandfathering excuses upgrading. It does not excuse decay. The building code carries its own maintenance and owner-responsibility provisions, and a stair that was compliant when built does not get to rot. Rhode Island’s own leading spoliation case arose from a bulkhead stair at a Friendly’s that collapsed under a plumber, with rotted stringers alleged to have been in that condition for three years. A century-old stair is allowed to be steep. It is not allowed to be broken.

The fire code is treated differently. Rhode Island’s fire safety law contains a conformity provision addressing existing structures that are not in conformity, allowing the authority having jurisdiction to issue notices of violation with compliance timelines, permitting the fire marshal to summarily abate dangerous conditions, and requiring that all active fire protection systems previously required and installed in existing buildings continue to be properly maintained. Egress and life safety obligations do not simply vanish with the building’s age.

Code compliance is not the whole duty. Rhode Island’s underlying rule is reasonable care for the safety of persons reasonably expected to be on the premises, including protection against a dangerous condition the owner knew of or would have discovered by exercising reasonable care. A code number is evidence within that inquiry, not a substitute for it.

Rhode Island adopts the International Building Code, 2021 edition, as RISBC-1 for commercial and general construction, and the International Residential Code, 2021 edition, as RISBC-2 for one- and two-family dwellings, with a current effective date of December 1, 2025. Older articles saying Rhode Island is on the 2015 building code are describing a superseded printing.

Commercial. Rhode Island adopts the IBC means of egress chapter without changes, so the unmodified national numbers govern: a maximum riser height of seven inches and a minimum tread depth of eleven inches, with the greatest tread depth in a flight not exceeding the smallest by more than three eighths of an inch.

Residential. Rhode Island amended the residential stair provisions, and this is a real state-specific difference worth knowing. Rhode Island permits a maximum riser height of eight and one quarter inches and requires a minimum tread depth of nine inches, with the greatest riser height in a flight not exceeding the smallest by more than three eighths of an inch and the same three eighths tolerance on tread depth.

So Rhode Island residential stairs are permitted to be meaningfully steeper than commercial stairs. That is why “these stairs feel dangerous” is not by itself a claim in a Providence triple-decker.

But look at the tolerance, because it is the same in both codes and it is where cases are actually made. Three-eighths of an inch. Uniformity is the most litigable dimension in a stairway case because it is tight, objective, and measurable, and because a non-uniform riser is exactly what causes a person to fall. A stair rebuilt in sections, a landing added later, a bottom step poured to meet a settled walkway: those produce the variation that trips people, and they are frequently the product of work that triggered the code in the first place.

A stairway case is won or lost by whether someone documented the stairs before they were repaired.

The measurements that matter are each riser height individually rather than an average, each tread depth, the variation between the largest and smallest of each, the nosing projection and whether it is worn or broken, handrail presence, height, continuity, graspability and whether it is secure, guard height where there is an open side, lighting levels and switch locations, surface condition and slip resistance, and any change in the pattern at the top or bottom of the flight where falls concentrate.

Get photographs with a tape measure and a level in frame. Photograph the underside if it is accessible, because that is where rot, prior repair, and inadequate framing show. Photograph the whole flight from top and bottom to capture what a person actually sees while descending.

Then send a preservation demand immediately. Stairs get repaired after somebody falls, and the repair destroys the evidence. Rhode Island’s spoliation rule is more favorable than most people expect: our Supreme Court has held that although a showing of bad faith may strengthen the inference of spoliation, such a showing is not essential, and an earlier decision held that deliberate or negligent destruction of relevant evidence may give rise to an inference that it would have been unfavorable to the party responsible. That doctrine works best when the property was told in writing to leave the stairs alone.

Neither side gets what it wants here, and both overclaim.

Rhode Island’s rule is that the violation of a statute or an ordinance is not negligence in itself, but is to be used by the trier of fact merely as an aid in determining that issue on consideration of all the evidence. A measured code violation is evidence of negligence for a jury, and a strong piece of it. It is not an automatic verdict.

The corollary is the part plaintiffs should hear early. The absence of a violation, in a building lawfully grandfathered, is powerful defense evidence. It is not dispositive, because the duty of reasonable care is broader than the code, but a stairway case built only on the argument that the stairs are steep is a difficult case in Rhode Island.

Residential rentals. Rhode Island’s landlord and tenant act requires a landlord to comply with applicable building and housing codes affecting health and safety, to make all repairs necessary to keep the premises fit and habitable, and to keep all common areas in a clean and safe condition. Our Supreme Court has treated that duty as imposed by law, applying to structural elements whether or not the lease contains a repair covenant, in a case where a rotted second-story balcony railing collapsed. Since January 1, 2022, Rhode Island has also required landlords to carry general liability insurance of at least one hundred thousand dollars and to give tenants proof of it.

Commercial property. Rhode Island holds that a commercial landlord owes a duty to a tenant’s invitee only under the narrowest of circumstances, and is not liable unless the injury results from a breach of a covenant to repair in the lease, from a latent defect known to the landlord but not the tenant or guest, or because the landlord subsequently assumed the duty to repair. The lease is the first document.

Everyone lawfully there is owed the same care. Rhode Island abolished the invitee and licensee distinction in 1975 and restored the older framework in 1994 only as to trespassers. A tenant, a guest, a delivery driver, and a contractor on a Providence staircase are owed reasonable care alike.

Rhode Island applies pure comparative negligence. Your share of the fault reduces the recovery in proportion and never bars it, at any percentage.

And since a 2019 amendment, an open and obvious danger or defect does not bar recovery. That rule was practically written for stairway cases, because the defense is always that you had used those stairs a thousand times and knew exactly what they were. In Rhode Island, familiarity with a hazard is an argument about percentages.

A stairway case usually comes down to a set of measurements that only exist if somebody takes them before the repair. Contact Jeffrey Glassman Injury Lawyers for a free and confidential review, and let us get to the stairs while they are still the stairs you fell on. You owe us nothing unless we recover for you.

This page is attorney advertising and general information, not legal advice. Reading it does not create an attorney-client relationship. Every case is different, and past results do not guarantee a similar outcome.