Personal Injuries Law-Understanding
Legal Negligence Is Critical To Your Case

If you wish to pursue a personal injuries action against someone you will need to prove negligence on the part of the defendant.

 

But what exactly is negligence?

Firstly it is necessary to recognise that legal negligence and negligence as you would normally understand it are two different concepts. Ordinary, everyday negligence could be running late for a date or forgetting your wife’s birthday and whilst the consequences may be pretty severe in both these situations, it will not normally result in a law suit.

 

Legal negligence is a different concept and before looking at precisely what it is it must be pointed out that in order to sue for damages arising from a personal injury you will have to prove legal negligence.

 

Negligence forms a central plank in Tort law and it comprises 5 components, each of which must be proved to win your personal injury legal action.

 

Firstly the person who you are suing, the defendant, must owe you a duty of care under the law.

Secondly that duty of care must be broken. Thirdly there must be a direct link between the duty of care being broken and the injury that you then suffer.

Fourthly, there must have been some degree of forseeability between the action taken by the defendant and the subsequent injury that you suffered.

 

Finally any damage or injury that you have suffered must arise as a result of the conduct or action of the defendant.

 

Who owes me a duty of care?

In law, everybody owes you a duty of care but the standard of care that they owe you is that of the ordinary man. In other words the duty is based on the old legal concept of reasonableness which leads to the question “what would a reasonable man, exercising ordinary care in the circumstances, have done?”

 

So if and when your case comes to court the judge will explain to the jury this notion of duty of care and the reasonableness standard and the jury will answer the question “what would a reasonable person have done in this situation”. If the jury finds that the defendant, the person who injured you, acted reasonably and like an ordinary, sensible person would have acted, then you will lose your case.

 

It is important to realise too that the standard of reasonable conduct is an objective one which simply means that regardless of the particular characteristics of the individual concerned, the jury will decide what an ordinary person would have done.

 

A subjective test would be where the jury would make allowances for the intelligence, ability, education, social background etc. of the defendant. This clearly would be unfair on society because it would mean that really stupid people would, quite literally, get away with murder.

 

In conclusion to succeed with a personal injuries claim against another person you will need to prove your case on the balance of probability (the civil standard of proof) and that the 5 elements of negligence set out above were present.