What Liability Means to You...

Liability plays a key role in almost all personal injury claims. Understanding what "being liable" actually means is essential to making your case.

Liability is the legal term that is born from all the factors that make you a victim. It refers to where the fault lies. Liability is all about who is responsible for an accident or injury, and whoever possesses the most liability will ultimately have to pay for it.

Lawyers will have you think liability is an incredibly complex issue that requires a lot of knowledge to investigate. It is in some ways the holy grail of personal injury settlements because as long as this issue remains uncertain the insurance companies can argue against settling a claim.

The truth is that in most personal injury accident claims liability is very easy to establish. In most cases it requires little more than common sense and logic.

Here’s the idea:

In almost all cases, an accident happens as a result of someone being negligent. In non legal terms, it results from someone being careless. The person (or business, agency, etc.) that was negligent is then responsible to pay damages to the injured person.

That's liability. It falls on the person who caused the accident to happen. This is why the moments immediately following an accident are so important. This is the time when you can best remember what happened, find witnesses who can verify what happened and even take an accident photo for evidence later on.

Liability is easy to establish if the cause of the accident is easy to establish. If a car fails to signal for a turn and another driver is injured after hitting the car then the non-signaling driver was negligent. If there is a slip and fall accident resulting from a business not salting their icy sidewalk then the business was negligent. If someone is burned using an electrical product that malfunctioned during normal use then the manufacturer was negligent.

Now you see how clear cut liability can be. Unfortunately for a lot of us there is more to it then that.

In all of the above cases there is a very good chance that the victim was partially at fault as well. Maybe the second driver was distracted. Perhaps the person who slipped wasn’t wearing proper winter footwear. It could be that the burn victim used the product properly but didn’t wear recommended safety gear.

This is why the issue of liability should be forefront in your mind from the moment you come out of an accident. While both people are often partially at fault, the law stresses — in most states — that the person who was more negligent must pay the other at least a portion of the damages. The more they can prove you were careless the less they will have to pay. We will look into this a little further when discussing causation.

As you read on we'll discuss ways to protect yourself in these situations. There are steps you can take after an accident, and even before an accident, that can reduce the amount of liability that can be attached to you.

Still have questions about liability or negligence? Click Here.


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