Despite the level of care, you exercise in your daily routine, accidents can happen at any time, leaving you with significant physical injury and financial losses. Although accidents and their consequences are painful enough, the trauma is made worse when you learn that your accident was not your fault. If you believe that your incident resulted from someone else’s negligent conduct, you can file a personal injury lawsuit against them to obtain compensation for your monetary and non-monetary damages. Proving negligence is one of the most crucial components of any personal injury lawsuit. Hiring a Delray Beach injury attorney at Kogan & DiSalvo in Florida can help you keep your legal affairs in order and enhance your chances of success in a potential lawsuit resulting from your accident. Keep reading to learn how you can prove negligence in your personal injury lawsuit.
Table of Contents
About Negligence
Negligence is a legal term that refers to an individual’s intentional or unintentional actions that harm another individual in an accident. This is where someone’s actions have possibly endangered another person. There are multiple examples of negligence, the most common one being car accidents. It is a legal determination that entails the satisfaction of multiple components according to the principle of duty of care as outlined below.
Duty of Care
You must prove that the defendant owed you a duty of care, i.e., to create safe conditions and refrain from engaging in potentially dangerous or life-threatening behavior. For example, a driver is responsible for following all traffic laws and ensuring that their safe driving does not endanger the lives of other drivers, passengers, or pedestrians on the road. If they don’t follow these laws then they are endangering people’s lives. Disobeying the rules can lead to serious damage. This is why it’s important to always be vigilant.
Violation of Duty of Care
Proving negligence hinges on proof of violation of the said duty of care. You must prove that the defendant failed to exercise a reasonable amount of care under the circumstances of the incident. For example, a property management or administration failing to address a public safety hazard at the premises violates the duty of care they owe to their patrons. You need to be able to bring solid evidence that their negligence led to you getting hurt. This is how you create a claim against them. Once you have that claim then you can get legal professionals involved.
Causation
You must prove that the breach of duty of care on the part of the defendant resulted in direct physical, emotional, financial, or property damage to you or your loved one. Establishing a causal link between the defendant’s actions and your damages is one of the most important parts of determining negligence in any personal injury lawsuit. A good example of causation would be an overspeeding driver who crashes into another car and causes significant physical harm to the driver and passengers of the other vehicle. This is why it’s important to keep track of all the evidence at the scene of the crime. It will help you create these causations against the defendant and create a solid case to bring to court.
Damages
The outcome of a personal injury lawsuit is usually in the form of monetary compensation for a plaintiff’s physical, emotional, financial, and property damages. Proof of negligence includes proving that the damages resulted from the violation of the defendant’s duty of care owed to the plaintiff. Compensable damages include medical bills, costs of ongoing medical treatment, physical rehabilitation expenses, loss of income, incidental expenses, and more. It’s important to get back any money that you lost during this time. Especially if the situation could have been avoided in the first place.
Conclusion
Establishing negligence in a personal injury lawsuit can be quite challenging. Especially if the lawsuit involves more than one defendant. However, it is the key to obtaining financial compensation for your injuries and financial losses. If you or your loved one got injured in an accident due to someone else’s negligence, you should consult an expert personal injury lawyer as soon as possible. This will help to protect your legal rights and increase your chances of success. You deserve justice and a competent lawyer will make sure of that.