What Must You Prove to Win a Personal Injury Case?
In order to win a personal injury case, you must prove the following elements of your case:
- Duty
- Breach of Duty
- Proximate Cause
- Damages.
Our legal system holds people and corporations liable for their negligence by ordering that they pay an amount of money that a jury determines fairly makes up for or “compensates” them for the harms and losses that their negligent conduct proximately caused. The injured person bears the burden of proof.
What is Meant by Duty?
A ‘duty’ is a legal obligation to act or not act in a certain way. Every person of sufficient age and/or mental capacity to comprehend their duty has a general duty to not act negligently. When you act in a way that is considered negligent, you have breached your duty to not act negligently.
What is Negligence?
‘Negligence’ is the failure to exercise reasonable care. In terms of personal injury claims, a person or entity that is proven negligent will likely be responsible for compensating the victim injured. Said another way, everyone has a duty to exercise reasonable care.
Texas actually uses a modified comparative negligence standard. Under this standard, the neglgience of all parties involved may be determined by the jury in percentages. The percentage the plaintiff i found negligent can affect or even take away the recovery.
What Does Reasonable Care Mean?
‘Reasonable care’ is the degree of care that an ordinary prudent person would exercise under the same or similar circumstances. In a PI case, a person can usually be found negligent if they fail their duty to provide reasonable care, ultimately leading to a person’s injury.
What Does Proximate Cause Mean?
‘Proximate cause‘ means a cause that was a substantial factor in bringing about an event, and without which cause such event would not have occurred. Basically, it means that if this thing had not happened, the rest of the events would not have been set in motion and the person would not have been injured.
In order to be a proximate cause, the act or omission complained of must be such that a person using ordinary care would have foreseen that the event, or some similar event, might reasonably result therefrom. In Texas, there may be more than one proximate cause of an event.
When a person fails to exercise reasonable care and thereby causes another injury he may be held liable to the person for the damage done.
What are Damages?
The term ‘damages’ refers to the harm done as a result of negligence. What you may recover as damages is not unlimited. The law allows recovery for specific elements of damages. Common damages include pain and suffering, medical bills, lost income, scarring, physical impairment, and mental anguish.