What is Personal Injury Law?

 

Personal injury law or "tort law", is designed to protect you if you or your property is injured or harmed because of the act of somebody else. The personal injury field is a very large and broad area of the law, but the thing all cases must have in common are liability and damages. If liability can be proven then for what amount of the damages is the at fault part liable for. A successful personal injury case requires the person who caused the injuries or damages to compensate the injured party. Personal injury law covers a wide variety of cases below are a few common types of cases that fall under this area of law.

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• Slip & Falls

• Motor Vehicle Collisions

• Wrongful Death

• Workplace Accident

• Premise Liability

• Product Liability

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As you can see, personal injury law is a broad area of the law. The best way to know if you have a case is to consult and attorney who may see your case from a different angle than you. The attorneys at Seven Summits Law are more than happy to sit down with you about your case for a free consultation.

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Negligence

 

In order to prove that an at fault party should have to compensate the injured party negligence must be proven. Negligence is the failure to behave with the level of care that someone of ordinary prudence would have exercised under the same circumstances. Some common examples of negligence would be running a red light, a restaurant owner failing to put a wet floor sign out while mopping or an employer not following OSHA guidelines. There are many ways that a person can be found negligent, it is important to have an experienced attorney review your case.

 

It is possible that both the injured party and the at fault party can be found negligent for the same accident. In this situation, the question of comparative negligence comes into play. Comparative negligence allows a jury to allocate fault between the plaintiff and defendant. This would mean that if damages are valued at $10,000.00 and a jury ruled that the defendant is 70% negligent and the plaintiff is 30% negligent, the defendant would end up owing $7,000.00 to the plaintiff.