A recent ruling from the Texas Supreme Court reinforces a demanding evidentiary standard in premises liability cases and reminds plaintiffs that circumstantial evidence of a hazard’s cause is not the same as evidence of its duration. In H-E-B, LP v. Marissa Peterson, the Texas Supreme Court held that plaintiffs who bring premises liability claims based  on constructive knowledge must produce “evidence that the condition existed for a sufficient duration before the time and place of the injury for a premises owner to have discovered it.”¹

Factual Background

While shopping in the toy aisle at an HEB grocery store, Marissa Peterson slipped on a clear liquid puddle and fell. Peterson sued HEB for premises liability, alleging that HEB knew or should have known about the unreasonable risk of harm the puddle presented and failed to adequately provide a warning of it or make the premises reasonably safe.

Peterson testified that the puddle was six or seven inches wide and that she had no idea how long it was there before her fall. Similarly, her shopping companion did not know where the water had come from and estimated the puddle was two feet across. On his way to retrieve a store manager, Peterson’s companion recalled seeing “signs and little white trash cans and buckets up in several places” elsewhere in the store. The HEB manager who responded to the incident identified the source of the liquid as “rain” on the incident report because it had rained earlier in the day and no other source was apparent.

In the year before Peterson’s fall, the HEB store had experienced numerous leaks stemming from a remodeling project. Roof repair records covered a two-year window surrounding the incident. However, the records did not reveal any reports of a leak above the toy aisle or corresponding roof repairs ahead of the incident or after the date of the incident.

The Court’s Analysis

To succeed on a premises liability claim, an injured invitee must show that the property owner had actual or constructive knowledge of a condition of the premises over which it exercises control, that the condition was unreasonably dangerous, that the owner failed to exercise reasonable care to reduce or eliminate the risk of harm, and that such failure proximately caused the alleged injury. In this case, the only element at issue was whether HEB possessed constructive knowledge of the puddle. Because Peterson conceded that HEB had no actual knowledge of the puddle before she fell, the entire case hinged on constructive knowledge—a legal concept that requires showing the condition existed long enough that a reasonable owner should have discovered it.

The Court determined that a plaintiff must adduce some evidence that it is more likely than not that the condition existed long enough to give the premises owner a reasonable opportunity to discover it. The Court explained that whether a premises owner can be charged with constructive knowledge turns on the longevity of the dangerous condition, the owner’s or its agent’s proximity to the condition, and the condition’s conspicuity.

Central to this framework is what Texas courts call the “time-notice rule.” The rule exists because a factfinder cannot assess whether an owner had an opportunity to discover a dangerous condition without some temporal evidence indicating the condition existed long enough for a reasonable owner to have discovered it. The Court noted that this principle is “firmly rooted” in Texas jurisprudence.

Here, Peterson presented several categories of evidence to raise a fact issue on constructive knowledge. The Texas Supreme Court analyzed each one and found them each insufficient to establish constructive knowledge.

Evidence of Leaks Elsewhere in the Store

Peterson argued that HEB’s awareness of roof leaks in other parts of the store—evidenced by earlier records and the buckets, trash cans, and signs observed by her companion—should support a finding that HEB was on constructive notice of the puddle in the toy aisle. The Court rejected this argument and applied its earlier precedent, holding that to support a constructive knowledge finding, a roof leak must be in the vicinity of the liquid on the floor. Knowledge of a dangerous condition must correlate to that condition “at the time and place injury occurs, not some antecedent situation that produced the condition.” Because no records showed a leak in the vicinity of the toy aisle in the year before her fall, and the buckets and signs her companion observed were not located in the toy aisle, evidence of leaks at other locations in the store was not probative of HEB’s constructive knowledge of the puddle at issue.

The Cessation of Rain and the Dripping Rafter

Peterson pointed to video evidence showing that rain had stopped two hours before her fall, and to her own observation of water dripping from a rafter above the puddle at the time of the incident. The Court acknowledged these facts but found them legally insufficient. Evidence of rain or that water may have been falling from the ceiling at the moment of the fall does not establish how long the puddle had been accumulating, and it is that temporal dimension that the law requires.

The Size of the Puddle

Peterson also relied on testimony about the puddle’s size to suggest it had existed for a meaningful period of time. The Court held that the size of the puddle, without more, does not allow a jury to infer duration. Size alone is simply not evidence of how long the hazard existed.

HEB’s Inspection Protocol

Finally, Peterson argued that HEB’s heightened inspection protocol during rainstorms, combined with video footage showing no HEB employee had walked down the toy aisle in the two hours before the accident, was probative of constructive knowledge. The Court disagreed, stating that nothing about the inspection protocol indicated the duration of time the puddle existed before Peterson fell. An employee’s proximity to a hazard, with no evidence indicating how long the hazard was there, does not show a premises owner’s constructive knowledge of the hazard. No evidence suggested an HEB employee had neared the puddle before the accident.

Ultimately, the Court held that constructive knowledge of a dangerous condition requires evidence that the condition existed for a sufficient duration before the time and place of the injury for a premises owner to have discovered it. The record contained no evidence of how long the puddle existed before Peterson slipped on it; thus, the court of appeals erred in reversing summary judgment for HEB, and the trial court’s summary judgment in HEB’s favor was reinstated. Importantly, the Court declined to soften the evidentiary standard. It acknowledged that proving constructive knowledge of transient dangerous conditions like water puddles is difficult but repeatedly rejected calls for a relaxed burden of proof in slip-and-fall cases when the evidence is scant.

This ruling is noteworthy for premises owners and their counsel as the opinion reinforces that where a plaintiff cannot produce “temporal evidence of the duration the danger existed,” constructive knowledge cannot be established, presenting an opportunity for premises liability cases to be disposed of pre-trial.

1. H-E-B, LP v. Peterson, 2026 WL 969265 (Tex. Apr. 10, 2026). ↩︎