Personal injury law deals with any physical wrongdoing to an individual. Many types of law fall under this in Alabama, including dangerous accidents like car accidents, truck accidents, motorcycle accidents, wrongful death, malpractice by medical providers, and other injuries. The specifics of different injury cases may change the requirements. An injury lawyer at our firm will help you determine if you have an injury case in Huntsville, Alabama based on the following factors:
Duty of Care
To argue that someone harmed you at no fault of your own, you must first prove that someone else owed you a legal duty of care. At any given time, you may owe others around you a duty of care.
For example, when you’re driving, you owe a duty of care to other drivers on the road by driving safely and following the law.
Remember that you don’t always owe another person a duty of care. For example, if you saw someone slip and fall on another person’s property, you don’t owe the victim a duty of care.
Breach of Duty of Care
Once you’ve established that the other party had a duty of care, you must show a lawyer how they breached it. Consider a case involving a defective product. If the product was medicine and was poorly made, resulting in you getting sick, the breach of duty of care was the failure to provide the promised product.
Causation
While someone else may have breached their duty of care, their negligence may not be relevant if it didn’t cause the injury. As a result, a lawyer has to prove causation of the injury.
Continuing the product liability example, the negligence of putting the wrong ingredients in the product directly caused the injury. Without the link of causation, even if someone else was being negligent or acting wrongfully, you do not have a personal injury case.
Damages
Even if someone else’s actions caused an accident and injury to happen, you must prove that you experienced damages and injuries as a result. For example, say you were in a car accident and the other party breached a duty of care by texting and driving. Their negligence caused you to swerve off the road, but you and your vehicle were unscathed. You do not have any damages or injuries to make claims.
Similarly, if the damages happening around this same event did not occur due to the breach of care, you do not have a case. If you had a car accident where you were not at fault, but the only damages that occurred were breaking your arm while getting out of the car, your claim is null and void.