Negligence. It can cause serious injuries and result in very unfortunate accidents.
At times, these can even lead to legal cases in the personal injury field of law. In 2020, there was a 97% rise in personal injury filings compared to the year before.
Negligence can be a big reason why these personal injury cases are being filed. Sometimes, the defendant in a personal injury case gets charged with negligence in these cases.
But, what is negligence? What do you need to know about negligence law to win your personal injury case?
Here is everything that you need to know.
What Is Negligence?
Negligence is when a defendant had a duty of care to provide to the plaintiff that they failed to do. This is commonly associated with medical malpractice, where a doctor could be responsible for the poor practice or ignoring obvious basics in the field for proper patient care.
However, it can stretch to almost any situation where there is a duty of care involved. You usually have to prove that a defendant did not provide this duty of care on top of proving that they were responsible to provide any duty of care.
There are two other things that a plaintiff would have to prove to have a defendant be legally guilty of negligence.
The first thing is that they have to prove that there was an injury suffered. An example could be if someone develops breast cancer and they suspect that it was because of contaminated water that they were exposed. After that, they prove that their injury or condition was related to the negligence conducted by the defendant.
Once all four of these aspects are proven in a court of law, a plaintiff can get awarded compensation for negligence.
Types of Negligence
There are different types of negligence that can be at play when it comes to a court of law. Out of these, there are four main types of negligence that you should be aware of.
Gross Negligence
This tends to be the most serious type of negligence that can occur. That is because this type of negligence violates basic practices in a certain field.
An example can be a doctor not doing a routine check-up for a patient, not taking x-rays, or reading the wrong medical documents to a patient.
Say if your medical documents get mixed up with another person in a hospital. That causes you not to hear a diagnosis of a terminal disease such as pancreatic cancer in time.
With something as serious as that, you need all of the time that you can get to take action and fight it. However, negligence resulted in you getting absolutely no warning and no treatment in time to stop it.
If this can be proven in a court of law, your loved ones would be entitled to compensation from the hospital for gross negligence.
Contributory Negligence
This type of negligence is the least practiced out of any of the four main types. In fact, contributory negligence is only practiced in four states in the entire country. Those four states are:
- Alabama
- Maryland
- Virginia
- North Carolina
- Washington D.C.
So, this type of negligence is one that you only have to worry about in certain states. The reason why this is only practiced in so few states is that it heavily favors the defendant.
This is because if the plaintiff is even found slightly at fault for the negligence that occurred, they are not eligible to receive any sort of compensation.
An example is if you accidentally ran through a red light with your car. Then, someone that is driving drunk goes a little too early and crashes into your car.
While in normal circumstances, driving drunk would overrule you going through a red light, in the states above, you would not be able to receive any compensation for it.
Comparative Negligence
Comparative negligence has been adopted by several states as sort of a replacement for contributory negligence. This one tends to give the plaintiff a better chance at winning their case because it considers their percentage of fault.
In other words, as long as a plaintiff is not more than 50% liable for the negligence or injury that occurred, they can receive some sort of compensation.
However, the amount would be determined by how much fault they have in the case. An example would be if a plaintiff was originally entitled to $20,000 but was found to be 20% liable for the injury, then they would get paid out about $16,000.
Vicarious Negligence
Finally, there is vicarious negligence. This type of negligence occurs when someone is indirectly responsible for an incident.
One of the most common causes of this is when your pet injures another person. If a cat scratches you and it leads to an infection or a dog bites you and it leads to an infection, the pet owner can be held liable for your injury damages.
Hire a Lawyer in Negligence Law
If you think someone has committed any of these types of negligence to you, then you could be entitled to compensation. To make sure that you get this compensation, you should hire a lawyer that specializes in negligence law such as personal injury cases.
Read this article over and remember the four main types of negligence. Also, remember what state you live in if you think this could be contributory negligence.
Do you need legal representation? Message us today for a free consultation.
Posted in: Medical Malpractice