How is Fault Determined After a Personal Injury?

If you’ve been injured and you believe someone else is to blame, you have the legal right to seek compensation. You can do this by filing a personal injury claim. If you’re in a situation like this, it’s important to understand how fault is determined and how it could affect your eligibility for compensation.

Defining Legal Liability

When an accident occurs as a result of someone’s careless actions or inactions, the victim can seek damages. Common situations include car accidents, medical malpractice, premises liability, truck crashes, and defective products.

To determine legal liability after a personal injury, a number of factors are taken into consideration. The most common include whether the injured person was where they were supposed to be or also acted carelessly, the negligent person caused the accident while working for someone, the accident occurred on a poorly maintained property, or the accident was caused by a defective product.

Proving Negligence After a Personal Injury

The majority of personal injury claims are based on negligence, which refers to failing to take reasonable care to avoid causing an injury or fatality. There are four elements needed to prove negligence, which include:

• The first step to proving negligence involves showing the defendant owed the plaintiff a duty of care. For example, drivers have a responsibility to abide by traffic laws and take precautions to ensure they don’t put others in harm’s way.
• Breach refers to a defendant disregarding their duty. To continue the car accident example, if a driver runs a stop sign or speeds and causes an accident, they breached their duty to others.
• To prove causation, you need to be able to show the defendant’s actions caused your injury. Typically, this is done by providing medical records that directly link the date and time of the accident to the injuries.
• Damages refer to the losses the plaintiff sustained as a result of the personal injury. Damages can be economic and noneconomic.

Proving negligence after an accident can be a challenge. That’s why it’s important to work with an injury attorney. With an experienced lawyer by your side, your chances of receiving full and fair compensation increase.

Shared Fault and Fault Percentages

In some accidents, multiple parties are at fault. There’s even the chance the victim could have played a small role in the event that caused their injuries. When this happens, most states have one of two systems in place – comparative fault or contributory fault.

Comparative negligence is the more common of the two. It breaks down fault by percentages and reduces compensation accordingly. So, if it’s determined that the personal injury victim was at fault for 10 percent of their accident, they’ll only be eligible for 90 percent of the compensation. States also break down comparative negligence into pure and modified. Pure comparative negligence means that you can recover compensation from the other party, even if you’re 99% to blame for what happened. With modified comparative negligence, the ability to receive compensation is typically cut off after 50% fault is determined.

States that recognize contributory negligence say that even if you’re one percent at fault for your accident, you are not eligible for any form of compensation, regardless of the losses.

If you can prove the other party was at fault for your accident after a personal injury, you’ll be on the road to receiving the compensation you need to recover physically, emotionally, and financially.