California Personal Injury Law - When Is A Person Negligent?

A very high percentage of personal injury claims go to court because of another party's carelessness. When such carelessness results in a personal injury, accident attorneys refer to it as "negligence."

In order to prove that a person has been negligent in California, an accident attorney must show four things:

1. Causation - that the other party's carelessness was the cause of the victim's injury.

2. Duty - that the party that caused the injury owed a duty to the victim that would have prevented them from acting carelessly under whatever circumstances were in existence at the time of injury.

3. Breach of Duty - that whoever owed the victim this duty acted carelessly under this specific set of circumstances.

4. Damages - that the victim suffered from some sort of damage or damages because the party who was responsible for causing the injury caused harm, owed a duty, and acted carelessly.

Attorneys who specialize in personal injury law are well versed in these concepts. They know what steps must be taken in order to enhance the probability that they will win their client's personal injury cases.

For example, a personal injury attorney will initially need to prove that the entity responsible for your injury owed you a duty.

At times this is very easy to prove because people will often owe a duty simply by the nature of the victim's relationship with them. At other times, though, whether or not they have a duty to take due care is not as obvious.

Let's say that you're in a supermarket and another shopper is walking around shopping and inadvertently knocks a bottle of oil off the shelf. The bottle breaks and the contents spill on the floor. However, instead of notifying someone in the store or wiping it up, he just walks on.

You walk down the aisle looking at the shelves and don't see the oil on the floor. So you slip, fall, and suffer a personal injury.

In this case it would not be obvious whether or not the shopper owed you a duty of care. And because duty of care would be in question it wouldn't be obvious that he was responsible for your personal injury.

Now, suppose that your personal injury attorney finds out that the oil was on the floor for a couple of hours. Your attorney will probably argue that the supermarket manager has a duty to make sure that you have a safe shopping experience.

Because the manager didn't notice the oil and failed to clean it up, he or she may very well have failed in their duty. In this instance, the courts will probably decide that the manager and/or the supermarket owner will have to pay for your personal injury.

This is only one of the many reasons most people contact a personal injury attorney before filing a claim. A personal injury attorney knows what to look for and how to best approach each unique situation.

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