Definition of Negligence and Other Basic Rules of Liability...

Understanding the definition of negligence is essential to your personal injury claim since establishing negligence relates directly to establishing liability.

Negligence is the second of three factors you need to identify when making your claim:

• First, you need to show causation, as we discussed earlier. Causation might be the broken tile that caused you to trip and fall.


• Second, you need to show that negligence was at play. If negligence didn't lead to the tile being loose, then you can't pursue a personal injury case.


• Third, you need to establish verifiable damages.

There is a class of cases that involve what is legally defined as negligence. Defective product and malpractice, as well as assault and battery cases, are in categories of their own.

Most accidents involve a person who's considered legally to be at fault. This determination must be made before you send a notice of intent to file a claim.

Some cases may have more than one negligent party. If this occurs in your case, it's important to identify the different parties.

Being involved in a multiple cars collision may help you in the long run. If one driver's insurance coverage isn't enough to cover your damages, the other drivers' coverage can make up the difference in your claim.

Remember, when negligence lies with several parties, all liable parties can be made to pay at least a percentage of your personal injury settlement.

However, YOU may have also shown negligence in the accident.

Consider a broken floor tile that causes someone to trip and fall. Property and business owners can be made liable because they were negligent in the care of their property. But, if the person who tripped was running recklessly at the time of the accident, they might also be negligent.

Slip and fall cases are often difficult to win because of these types of arguments. The defense can be quite effective at convincing the juries that the plaintiff "should have been more careful." Personal responsibility is a common theme in slip and fall cases.

Of course this isn't always relevant. Many activities, like playing sports in a gym, involve running. So in this case, even though the running added to the causation, it might not have been a negligent action (with regards to the definition of negligence). It was an action within reason.

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Injured persons shown to have partial negligence in an accident will likely have their damages adjusted by the insurance company. The insurance adjuster will define negligence for their client as a percentage, and apply that percentage to the total injury settlement amount. The resulting figure is what they'll offer as compensation.

Some states have very strict rules on negligence. If the injured person shares fifty percent or more of the fault, then no third party claim can be made.

A few states go further, requiring that the injured person must show no fault at all in order to file a third party claim. The difficulty is that it's hard to agree on what officially qualifies as negligence. This is often gray area where personal injury negotiations get bogged-down.

Later in this section we'll look at rules of liability that apply to animals and children. The law goes to great lengths to single these two groups out, because, according to the definition of negligence, neither can be considered legally responsible for their own actions.