Proving Fault in Personal Injury Accidents: General Rules
How to decide who is legally at fault for an accident or personal injury.
Determining legal responsibility for an accident or injury (often called "liability") can be complicated, but often rests on whether someone was careless or "negligent." It's easy enough to say that the person or business that caused an accident must pay for your injuries. But before you get to that point, you must determine who was legally at fault.
Determining Legal Liability
Most accidents happen because someone was careless. The basic rule is: If one person involved in an accident was less careful than another, the less careful one must pay for at least a portion of the damages suffered by the more careful one.
Legal liability for almost all accidents is determined by this rule of carelessness, and by one or more of the following simple propositions:
- If the injured person was where he or she was not supposed to be, or somewhere he or she should have expected the kind of activity which caused the accident, the person who caused the accident might not be liable because that person had no "duty" to be careful toward the injured person.
- If the injured person was also careless, his or her compensation may be reduced by the extent such carelessness was also responsible for the accident. This is known as comparative negligence.
- If a negligent person causes an accident while working for someone else, the employer may also be legally responsible for the accident.
- If an accident is caused on property that is dangerous because it is poorly built or maintained, the owner of the property is liable for being careless in maintaining the property, regardless of whether he or she actually created the dangerous condition.
- If an accident is caused by a defective product, the manufacturer and seller of the product are both liable even if the injured person doesn't know which one was careless in creating or allowing the defect, or exactly how the defect happened. (For more information, see Proving a Defective Product Liability Claim.)
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