Personal Injury Basics: Negligence 101

When negligence is present, it means you can hold someone legally responsible for behaving in such a way as to cause you harm or have you suffer a loss. Personal injury claims based on negligence have the purpose of recovering money due to the harm you have experienced. The main forms of negligence claims are:

• Car and truck accidents
• Slip and fall
• Dog bites
• Defective products
• Wrongful death
  

How is negligence proven in a personal injury lawsuit?

To prove negligence, the injured party must present evidence that these four elements existed:

Duty

In these cases, this means that the defendant owed the injured party a duty of care. This duty is established by looking at the relationship between plaintiff and defendant. This may be a duty that the doctor owes a patient or one car driver to another. As such, it is expected that the defendant must have acted in a reasonable way towards the plaintiff.

Breach

This point refers to the fact that the duty of care described above was breached. During a lawsuit, the court has the opportunity to determine whether the defendant failed to act in the way that it is expected that any other reasonable and prudent person would have acted in similar circumstances. This means that the behavior of the defendant did not follow what was expected of them in a similar case.

Causation

Causation explains how the breach resulted in damages to the plaintiff, meaning that it was precisely this breach that caused the injuries and not something else. In this element, there are two sections:

Direct cause – The injuries or losses that the plaintiff suffered would never have occurred if the defendant had acted as expected under the circumstances.

Proximate cause – There is reason to believe that the defendant could have foreseen that their own actions might have caused injuries to the plaintiff. That is, the injuries did not just happen randomly.
Damages

Damages are what the plaintiff is expecting to recover through this legal action. Damages are the compensation a plaintiff expects to receive in order to compensate for the injuries or losses they have undergone. The amount of the damages is meant to cover such expenses as medical bills, lost wages, bills to repair the property such as a car in an accident, and pain and suffering.

Talk to a Personal Injury Lawyer

If you believe your injuries or losses were, in fact, caused by someone else’s negligence, Grossman Law Offices recommends that you schedule a consultation with a personal injury attorney to talk about your case and determine whether you have a claim worth pursuing.

If so, your attorney will ask you to provide certain information, such as a detailed list of your medical expenses so far and those you expect to incur in the future when following the treatment that your healthcare provider has prescribed. Also, pay stubs to prove how much income you have been unable to earn while recovering from your injuries. And if you have pictures that were taken at the scene of the accident, videos from cameras that might have captured it, or testimonies from witnesses at the scene, your lawyer will use this information to come up with an exact value for your case and build a strong defense.
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