Personal Injury Is Not Always an Accident: 4 Indicators of Negligence

When you are filing a personal injury claim, it is important to identify who can be held liable in your case. But liable and negligent are not the same thing. Negligence falls under the umbrella of liability but is much more specific in nature.

When someone is negligent, it generally means they failed to perform expected and reasonable actions that lead to an accident or injury. An example of negligence in a personal injury case is if a family rents a car from a rental agency, they expect that car to be well maintained and inspected prior to their rental purchase. If the family gets in a car accident due to something like the tire not being in good shape or the power steering going out, this can count as negligence.

5 Indicators of Negligence:

1) Duty of Care

What is duty of care? Most people have duty of care toward someone in their life. For parents, they have duty of care to their children. For mechanics, they have duty of care to their customers. For airlines, they have duty of care to their passengers and employees. Duty of care encompasses the responsibility one has to someone else to not place them in the path of preventable danger. It is important to identify duty of care at the beginning of your personal injury case to identify negligence.

2) Duty of Care Violated

The next indicator of negligence in a personal injury case is whether or not the parties involved violated their duty of care. In other words, did the individual live up to their responsibility to keep the other party out of dangers way? This could look like texting while driving and then causing an accident. By choosing to break the safety law that prevents texting and driving, the individual violated their duty of care toward the other drivers on the road.

3) Violation is Connected to Injury

The next indicator of negligence in a personal injury case is if the violation of duty of care directly caused the personal injury. Believe it or not, someone can violate their duty of care and still not be the cause of the injury. If the cause of the injury was proven to not be from the accident, or if the liable party has proof that you also contributed to the accident by violating your own duty of care, causation may not be identified.

4) Injury leads to Financial Damages

If you have identified duty of care, proven the violation of it, and connected it to your injury, the last step to take is to identify how your personal injury has led to physical, emotional, and financial damages at the hand of their negligence.

If there was negligence in your personal injury case, you may need a personal injury attorney. Click here to learn more.