When a Fall Becomes a Lawsuit: What Attorneys Should Know Before Hiring a PERS Expert Witness

Key Takeaways

• Falls Prevention Awareness Week (September 21–25) is a reminder that when a personal emergency response (PERS) system fails to work as promised, the result is often litigation, not just an injury.
• Whether a PERS provider met the standard of care hinges on dispatch protocols, signal-to-response time, monitoring center staffing, and documentation – details a generalist expert can’t credibly evaluate.
• Only a small handful of people in the country do life-safety expert witness work at a senior level, and a report’s strength often comes down to whether the expert has actually run a monitoring operation, not just studied one.
• These cases typically split into wrongful death or injury claims against a provider, and disputes where an insurer needs an early, credible read before deciding whether to settle or litigate.
• Attorneys who bring in an expert with direct operating experience, not just a security generalist, get a more defensible report and a stronger position at deposition.

An elderly subscriber presses her PERS button after a fall. The signal reaches the monitoring center, a call is placed, and somewhere in that sequence — a delay in dispatch, a missed callback, a device that didn’t transmit — something goes wrong. The family later asks the same question a court will eventually have to answer: did the provider do what it was supposed to do, and did it do it fast enough? Answering that question credibly requires an expert witness who has actually run a monitoring operation, not one who is reading an industry standard for the first time in preparation for a deposition.

Why Falls Prevention Awareness Week Is Relevant to Litigators

Falls Prevention Awareness Week exists because falls are the leading cause of injury among older adults, and the entire premise of a PERS device is to shorten the gap between a fall and a response. That gap is exactly what gets litigated. When the response works, nobody hears about it. When it doesn’t, from a signal that didn’t dispatch, a callback that never happened, or a response time that stretched past what the industry considers reasonable, the case almost always turns on a handful of technical details that a generalist personal-injury or insurance-defense attorney has no reason to already know.

What a Life Safety Expert Witness Actually Evaluates

A credible report in one of these cases isn’t built on the device’s marketing claims. It’s built on the operational record:

• Signal-to-dispatch time, measured against the industry’s own operating standard, not a generic customer-service benchmark.
• Monitoring center staffing and training records at the time of the incident: who was on shift, how they were trained, and whether protocol was followed.
• Call logs, recordings, and dispatch transcripts, which usually tell a more precise story than either side’s initial account.
• The subscriber’s service agreement, including any language limiting liability or defining the scope of the response promised.
• Prior complaint or incident history for the device, the monitoring center, or the account itself.
• The technical performance of the device, including whether fall-detection or signal transmission functioned as designed.

Getting this right requires someone who understands what “normal” looks like inside a working central station, not just what a policy manual says should happen.

The Two Shapes These Cases Usually Take

Injury or wrongful death claims

A subscriber or their family alleges the PERS provider’s response. or failure to respond, contributed to an injury or death. These cases hinge on whether the provider’s actions matched the standard of care an operator in this specific industry, not a general call center, would be expected to meet.

Insurance coverage and settlement decisions

Errors & omissions carriers frequently need an early, credible technical read before deciding whether to settle or litigate a claim. An expert who can assess the operational facts quickly and accurately shapes that decision long before a case reaches a courtroom.

Why So Few Experts Can Do This Work Credibly

Life safety is a narrow enough industry that only a handful of people in the country provide expert witness services at a senior level, and most of them know each other. What separates a strong report from a vulnerable one is usually direct operating experience, such as having owned or run a security, alarm, or PERS company, not just studied one from the outside. That background is what lets an expert explain to a judge or jury what a monitoring center can and cannot reasonably be expected to catch, in language a non-technical audience can follow.

Where to Start This Week

• Request the full dispatch log and call recordings for the incident as early as possible. Memory of “what usually happens” fades faster than the record does.
• Identify the exact device model and its service and maintenance history.
• Pull the subscriber’s service agreement and any amendments to it.
• Engage a life safety expert early, ideally before depositions, so the technical framework is in place from the start rather than retrofitted later.

The Bottom Line

Falls Prevention Awareness Week is built around a simple idea: most falls, and much of their harm, are preventable. In litigation, the equivalent question is whether a PERS provider’s response was reasonable given what the industry itself considers standard practice — and answering it well requires an expert witness who has actually operated in the PERS and personal emergency response space, not one encountering it for the first time on this case.

If you have a matter that touches PERS response times, dispatch protocols, or monitoring center standards, book a call to talk through whether an expert witness engagement makes sense for your case.

Frequently Asked Questions

What does a PERS expert witness evaluate in a wrongful death or injury case?

A PERS expert witness typically reviews signal-to-dispatch time, monitoring center staffing and training records at the time of the incident, call recordings and dispatch transcripts, the subscriber’s service agreement, and the technical performance of the device itself, all measured against what the industry considers a reasonable standard of response.

When should an attorney bring in a life safety expert witness?

As early as possible — ideally before depositions. An expert who reviews the dispatch record, device history, and service agreement early can shape case strategy, inform settlement conversations, and prevent gaps in the technical record from going unaddressed until it’s too late to fill them.