You’ve probably heard of negligence before. Usually, when we call someone negligent, we mean that they acted recklessly, failed to take reasonable precautions, or forgot to do something important. You may be surprised to learn that the aforementioned definition isn’t too far from the legal definition of negligence. Negligence is a legal concept that personal injury lawyers refer to a lot. When a defendant is negligent, and a plaintiff is injured due to the defendant’s negligence, the plaintiff may have a claim. If you’ve been injured due to someone else’s negligence, you may be entitled to compensation. Contacting a reliable injury lawyer may help you determine whether or not filing a claim is in your best interest.

What Is Negligence?

Legally speaking, a defendant is considered to be negligent when they had a duty of care, breached their duty of care, and caused the plaintiff damages. Though that sounds relatively simple, when it comes to personal injury, there’s a lot that’s up for debate and negotiation. When a personal injury attorney is proving their client was the victim of the defendant’s negligence, they’ll have to prove the case has all the elements of negligence. You can think of elements of negligence like the ingredients to a recipe. If an injury lawyer cannot prove that their claim has all of these elements, they may have a hard time persuading an attorney that the defendant was indeed negligent.

Duty of Care

First, injury lawyers will try to prove that the defendant had a duty of care toward the client or plaintiff. You can think of duty of care in the same way that you’d think of a job or a responsibility. For example, if you own a dog, you have a responsibility to make sure that he doesn’t attack other people or other animals. If you’re driving through a busy street, you have a duty of care to look out for pedestrians, even ones who are jaywalking. Keeping your dog restrained, looking out for pedestrians, and not driving a car after you’ve ingested alcohol, can all be thought of as a duty of care. In the most certain terms, you have a duty of care toward others to conduct yourself in a responsible manner, and take reasonable precautions.

Breach of Duty

Breach of duty is closely related to duty of care. After an injury lawyer proves the defendant had a duty of care, they’ll need to show that the defendant breached their duty of care. Going back to the previous examples, a defendant may have breached their duty of care if they allow their dog to run off-leash, and then their dog attacks another person. Or, in the example of a driver driving through a busy city, if the defendant is distracted and runs over a pedestrian, they have breached their duty of care. Whether or not the defendant had breached their duty of care has a lot to do with whether or not the defendant has taken reasonable precautions to prevent injury from occurring.

Damages to the Plaintiff

After injury lawyers prove that the defendant breached the duty, they have to prove that the plaintiff has been damaged. It’s important to note that, at this point, they don’t have to prove that the defendant caused these damages; that part will come later. Instead, they just have to prove that the plaintiff did indeed sustain an injury, and has been damaged as a result. If the defendant’s dog bit the plaintiff, the medical records, medical bills, and evidence of loss of income could all be evidence of the fact the plaintiff has been damaged. Again, the injury lawyer just needs to prove there are damages at this part.

Causation

Once it is proven that there are damages to the plaintiff, the attorney will have to prove that the defendant’s conduct, or breach of duty, has caused the plaintiff’s damages. This is called causation. If the plaintiff is injured by the defendant’s dog, a video of the defendant’s off-leash dog attacking the plaintiff may be good evidence that the plaintiff’s conduct injured you. Causation is one of the more difficult elements of a personal injury claim that an attorney has to prove. This is especially true if a client waits too long to get treatment for their injuries, or doesn’t get the right kind of imaging soon enough. If you have been injured, you need to get treatment for your injuries and contact a personal injury attorney as soon as possible.