Las VegasPremises LiabilityLawyer.

What's Different at Sellouk Law

When you hire Sellouk Law, your case is handled by Roey Sellouk himself — a former federal judicial clerk — not passed to a case manager or junior staff. The firm keeps its caseload deliberately small, charges a competitive contingency fee, and prepares every file as if it is going to trial. You speak directly with your attorney from the first call, with bilingual staff available for Spanish-speaking clients.

What is premises liability under Nevada law?

Premises liability is the area of Nevada law that holds property owners and occupiers accountable when a dangerous condition — or a failure to manage the property safely — injures someone. NRS 41.130 gives injured people the right to recover damages for another's wrongful act or neglect, and Nevada owners owe entrants a duty of reasonable care that includes inspection, maintenance, repair, and warning.

Most people hear "premises liability" and picture a fall on a wet floor. The doctrine is far broader. It reaches assaults enabled by broken security gates, merchandise that topples from an overhead shelf, a parking garage left dark for months, a pool gate that never latched, and a stairwell a landlord stopped maintaining years ago. In every variation, the legal question is the same: did the owner act reasonably in finding, fixing, or warning about the danger — and when a third party created the hazard, did the owner have actual or constructive notice of it before you were hurt.

Las Vegas concentrates premises risk: high-rise garages, sprawling apartment communities, 24-hour retail, and properties that never close. Owners here are also unusually sophisticated — large properties run risk-management departments and insurer relationships that begin shaping a defense the day you are injured. The notice requirement is where these cases are won or lost, which is why early evidence preservation matters more in a premises claim than in almost any other injury case.

Roey Sellouk, the firm's founder, served as a judicial clerk at the U.S. District Court for the District of Nevada before opening Sellouk Law — experience that shapes how every premises case here is built: procedurally exact, documented early, and prepared as if a judge will scrutinize it. The firm keeps its caseload deliberately small, you work directly with your attorney from the first call, and bilingual staff serve Spanish-speaking clients.

What types of premises liability cases does Sellouk Law handle?

Sellouk Law handles the full premises liability spectrum in Las Vegas and Clark County: negligent security and third-party assaults, inadequate lighting and maintenance failures, falling merchandise and fixtures, parking-lot and parking-garage injuries, apartment-complex and HOA common-area hazards, swimming-pool and spa incidents, and dog bites on another person's property.

A dangerous property is rarely dangerous in just one way. The same complex that ignores a broken security gate usually ignores burned-out lighting and overdue repairs — and the evidence in one category often proves the other. Cases the firm handles include:

• Negligent security — assaults, robberies, and other crimes enabled by broken gates, missing or disabled cameras, dark corridors, or absent security staffing
• Inadequate lighting and maintenance — injuries in stairwells, walkways, and corridors that owners allowed to deteriorate
• Falling objects — merchandise stacked overhead in big-box stores, unsecured fixtures and signage, and construction materials
• Parking lots and garages — potholes and broken curbing, defective gates and barriers, missing wheel stops, and crime enabled by darkness
• Apartment and HOA hazards — collapsing stairs and railings, failed access gates, deteriorating balconies, and neglected common areas
• Pool and spa incidents — missing or broken barriers, gates that do not self-latch, slippery decks, and absent safety equipment
• Dog bites — attacks on another person's property, including cases where a landlord or property manager knew a dangerous animal was being kept

Two scenarios get their own dedicated coverage on this site: if you fell on a wet, broken, or uneven surface, start with our Las Vegas slip-and-fall page; if you were hurt at a resort property, our hotel and casino injury page addresses the issues specific to those defendants, from rolling surveillance retention to risk-management tactics.

When is a property owner liable for negligent security in Las Vegas?

A Las Vegas property owner can be liable for an assault, robbery, or other crime committed by a third party when the wrongful act was foreseeable and the owner failed to take reasonable precautions. For hotels, motels, and other lodging properties, NRS 651.015 sets that standard expressly — and makes prior similar incidents the owner knew about a key path to proving foreseeability.

NRS 651.015 governs innkeepers — hotels, inns, motels, motor courts, boardinghouses, and lodging houses. Under the statute, an innkeeper is liable for death or injury caused by someone who is not its employee only when the wrongful act was foreseeable and the owner failed to take reasonable precautions against it. The statute assigns the foreseeability question to the court as a matter of law, and it provides that a wrongful act is not foreseeable unless the owner failed to exercise due care for the safety of people on the premises, or prior incidents of similar wrongful acts occurred there and the owner had notice or knowledge of them.

Many Las Vegas negligent-security cases, though, arise on properties NRS 651.015 does not reach: apartment complexes, standalone parking garages, shopping centers, nightclubs, and event venues. Those owners are judged under Nevada's general negligence principles — a duty of reasonable care measured against what the owner knew about crime on and around the property. Prior police calls, broken access gates, disabled cameras, lapsed security contracts, and ignored tenant complaints all become central evidence.

Security evidence is uniquely perishable. Camera systems overwrite on rolling schedules, staffing records get archived, and ownership groups swap management companies. Sellouk Law sends preservation demands at the outset and uses discovery to reconstruct what the property actually knew before the night you were hurt. For assaults at resort properties specifically, see our hotel and casino injury page.

How do you prove a property owner knew about a dangerous condition?

Nevada premises claims generally turn on notice: you must show the owner either knew about the hazard (actual notice) or that it existed long enough that a reasonable inspection would have found it (constructive notice). When the owner or its employees created the condition, that knowledge is effectively built in. Proof comes from maintenance logs, work orders, prior incident reports, and surveillance.

Actual notice means the owner was told or otherwise knew — a tenant reported the dark garage level weeks ago, an employee logged the broken latch, a prior guest filed an incident report about the same display shelf. Constructive notice means the condition existed long enough, or was the kind of deterioration that develops slowly enough, that reasonable inspections would have caught it: a railing rusted through, a gate broken for a season, lighting that failed months before anyone replaced it.

The proof lives in documents the property controls. Inspection schedules and the gaps in them, work-order systems, prior incident and claim histories, internal emails, vendor and security contracts, lighting surveys, and — in falling-object cases — stocking and display policies all show what the owner knew and how long it sat on the problem. Surveillance footage adds the timeline, but only if it is preserved before the system overwrites it.

This is where the firm's approach pays off. Sellouk Law sends targeted preservation demands immediately, photographs and measures conditions before they are repaired or repainted, and drives discovery toward the records owners least want produced. A premises case built in the first two weeks looks very different from one reconstructed a year later.

Who is responsible for dog bites, pool incidents, and apartment hazards in Nevada?

Responsibility follows control. Dog owners — and in limited circumstances landlords who knew a dangerous animal was kept on the property — answer for bites. Pool owners and operators answer for broken gates, missing barriers, and unmaintained equipment. Landlords and HOAs answer for the common areas they control: stairwells, walkways, lighting, gates, and parking areas. Each claim proceeds under Nevada negligence principles.

Nevada has no specific civil dog-bite statute, so these claims proceed under ordinary negligence — which makes what the owner knew about the animal central. NRS 202.500, Nevada's criminal statute on dangerous and vicious dogs, defines when a dog qualifies as "dangerous" or "vicious," and an animal that already met those definitions or had a documented history of menacing behavior gives an injured person powerful evidence that the owner — and sometimes the landlord who allowed the animal to stay — was on notice.

Pool claims in Southern Nevada most often involve children, and they most often involve barriers: gates that do not self-latch, fencing with gaps, propped-open doors to pool decks, and broken locks at apartment and short-term-rental pools. Owners and operators owe reasonable care in maintaining those safeguards along with deck surfaces, drains, lighting, and safety equipment. Because the injuries can be catastrophic, these cases demand early, careful investigation of the maintenance and inspection history.

Tenants sometimes assume they cannot pursue their own landlord — they can. Landlords and HOAs remain responsible for the common areas under their control, and claims routinely arise from collapsing stairs and railings, dark breezeways, deteriorating balconies, security gates broken for months, and neglected sidewalks and parking areas inside the community. A renter injured in a common area has the same right to pursue a negligence claim as any visitor.

What deadlines and legal standards apply to a Nevada premises liability claim?

Most Nevada premises liability claims must be filed within 2 years of the injury under NRS 11.190(4)(e), with the clock generally paused while the injured person is a minor under NRS 11.250. Comparative negligence under NRS 41.141 allows recovery as long as your share of fault is 50% or less, and claims involving government property carry added requirements under NRS 41.036.

Two years sounds like time. In a premises case, it is not — hazards get repaired, footage gets overwritten, gates get fixed, and the property that injured you can look pristine within a month. The filing deadline is the outer legal limit; the practical evidence deadline is measured in days. Recoverable damages include medical expenses, future care, lost income and earning capacity, and pain and suffering.

Expect the defense to lean on comparative fault: you should have seen the hazard, you chose to cross the dark lot, you accepted the risk of the pool deck. Under NRS 41.141, those arguments reduce a recovery proportionally rather than eliminating it, so long as your share of fault is 50% or less — and how fault gets allocated depends almost entirely on the quality of the evidence assembled early.

If the dangerous property is a public sidewalk, park, school, or government building, NRS 41.036 directs tort claims against the State to the Attorney General and claims against counties, cities, and other political subdivisions to their governing bodies within 2 years, and NRS 41.035 caps the damages recoverable from government defendants and bars punitive damages against them. These claims are viable — but they reward early, procedurally exact handling.