Background
Mary Beth Housel tripped and fell on a floor mat at a Winking Lizard restaurant in Mayfield Heights on September 17, 2024. She filed a two-count complaint in the Cuyahoga County Court of Common Pleas alleging negligence and negligence per se against Winking Lizard Tavern and Cintas Corporation No. 2, the company that supplied the floor mat. Housel claimed the mat was “rumpled,” wet, and not lying flat, and that the poorly illuminated hallway rendered the hazard “difficult if not impossible to detect.”
A case-management schedule set deadlines for expert report exchanges: plaintiff’s reports were due by March 7, 2025, and defendant’s reports by April 11, 2025. Housel moved to exclude Cintas’s expert, Jeffrey Schroeder, arguing Cintas violated Civ.R. 26(B)(7)(e) by providing an expert report after it had already deposed plaintiff’s expert. The trial court denied the motion. Both defendants then moved for summary judgment, arguing the floor mat constituted an open-and-obvious hazard. The trial court granted both motions, and Housel appealed.
The Court’s Holding
The Eighth District affirmed the trial court on all grounds. On the expert-report issue, the court found that the case-management schedule set only an outer deadline for completing expert reports, not a rigid sequence. Because Cintas disclosed its expert report within the court-ordered timeframe and before the discovery cutoff, there was no Civ.R. 26(B)(7)(e) violation. The trial court acted within its discretion in denying Housel’s motion to exclude.
On the merits, the court applied Ohio’s open-and-obvious doctrine, which relieves a premises owner of any duty to warn or protect a business invitee from hazards that are “so obvious that the person should reasonably be expected to discover them.” The court found the rumpled floor mat was an observable condition, and that Housel failed to create a genuine issue of material fact as to whether any attendant circumstances existed that would have distracted her from noticing the hazard. Neither the lighting conditions nor the color of the mat established a genuine dispute sufficient to survive summary judgment.
Key Takeaways
- A case-management order setting a deadline for completing expert reports does not impose a mandatory sequence of exchange; compliance with the outer deadline satisfies Civ.R. 26(B)(7)(e).
- A rumpled floor mat at a commercial premises may qualify as an open-and-obvious hazard, negating the premises owner’s duty to warn.
- The attendant-circumstances exception to open-and-obvious doctrine requires the plaintiff to identify specific distractions or conditions that would prevent a reasonable person from discovering the hazard — generalized claims about lighting or color are insufficient.
Why It Matters
For Ohio premises-liability practitioners, this decision reinforces the strength of the open-and-obvious defense in slip-and-fall cases involving floor mats and similar observable hazards. The opinion also provides useful guidance on expert-discovery timing disputes: trial courts retain broad discretion to manage expert deadlines, and a party who timely discloses within the court-ordered window will not face exclusion simply because the opposing side deposed its own expert first. Practitioners challenging expert disclosures should focus on demonstrable prejudice rather than the sequence of exchange.