Several questions remain after a couple from New Hampshire sued Eataly in Boston after the wife fractured her ankle from slipping on a piece of prosciutto at the store last year.

Alice and Richard Cohen are suing Eataly after Alice fell from slipping on the slice while walking around the store on Oct. 7, 2022, according to a lawsuit filed in Suffolk Superior Court on Friday, Aug. 11.

The lawsuit claims that Eataly failed to “ensure that the surface of the floors were free from unnecessary dangers.” Therefore, the Cohens are suing the company for negligence while seeking “an amount sufficient to compensate” for Cohen’s treatment, according to the complaint.

However, this case is not as clear-cut as one may think.

John Perlstein is a personal injury and wrongful death lawyer licensed in California and Nevada who has represented roughly a thousand falls “in the last 15 years,” he told MassLive.

He said fall cases like this one are “tricky because businesses can’t be the insurer of everybody’s safety.”

If Eataly has a routine policy of cleaning its floors but the prosciutto was not picked up, then the store would be solely responsible. But if another customer is involved, that’s where things get hazy.

“If someone who’s eating a sandwich, and they’re walking and they drop it, and then three seconds later someone falls on it, how could they possibly protect against that,” Perlstein said. “They can’t protect against everything.”

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A video of the fall could help clarify the situation as well. Given all these factors, Perlstein said it is hard to tell if the couple has a good chance of winning. However, the severity of Cohen’s injury makes for a stronger case.

“Most falls of that nature where you have that bad an injury, it adds a component to it where the risk for the insurance company or the business is greater,” Perlstein explained “It drives up the ability to settle a case like that as opposed to have to prove that they were at fault because there’s bigger risk for the insurance company or the business involved.”

Perlstein also said the couple’s medical bills, which were reported as $2,274 on the hospital and $5,265 on physical therapy by Universal Hub, sound low for a fracture. This is especially true is Cohen needed surgery or some kind of hardware implants.

The couple believes they should be awarded at least $50,000 in damages, Universal Hub added. Perlstein said juries have no issue awarding this amount of money to people, especially if someone else is at fault.

“If somebody’s walking along and let’s say their life is disrupted like that, what do you award them on to have to deal with this on a daily basis? It’s substantial,” he said. “I always see it from the victim’s standpoint and I look at higher numbers because your health is so important.”

Eataly did not immediately respond to MassLive’s comment on the case.