Car Accident Cases

Car Accidents, Injuries & Legal Remedies

There were over five and a half million car accidents within the United States in 2009. Of those car accidents, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration reports that 33,808 traffic fatalities occurred. Many more people who were involved in car accidents were lucky and walked away alive, but over two million of those living victims suffered injuries as a direct result of the collisions they were involved in. Head on collisions were the number one source of fatalities in the US, but other collisions such as T-bone or side impact collisions and even single vehicle crashes also caused their fair share of injuries and deaths. When you get into a car accident, you first need to do everything in your power to make sure all involved people are OK. You do, however, also need to be cognizant of the fact that a car accident can lead to significant financial loss and to financial liability as well.

Understanding Car Accident Cases

When a car accident occurs, there are laws in place stipulating who has to pay for resulting damages and injuries. The laws are different from state to state but can broadly divided into a few different sets of rules. The approaches that states take to car accident cases include:

Pure Comparative Fault States

In these states a driver can be held responsible for any portion of car accident damages he or she is at fault for. For example, if a driver is two percent responsible for causing an accident, he can technically be held responsible for two percent of the resulting bills and damages.

Modified Comparative Fault States

In these states, a driver can be held responsible for car accident damages incurred by another if he is at least 50 percent at fault for causing the accident.

No Fault States

In no fault states, each driver is simply responsible for paying his or her own damages that result from a car accident, no matter who actually caused the accident. In the no fault states (there are 12), drivers must buy something called personal injury protection, or PIP, when they purchase car insurance. PIP kicks in after an accident to pay for medical bills and for lost income or wages that result from car-accident related injuries. It is important to note that PIP pays only medical bills and actual losses; damages for pain and suffering and emotional distress are not paid by PIP. The only way that a person can recover for his or her pain and suffering and non-economic damages in a no fault state is if the injuries are serious enough to fall within the state's defined exceptions to no fault rules.

A person who suffers an injury after a car accident, therefore, must first determine what the rules are for his or her state.

Determining Fault and Negligence

While differences in the law have a major impact on what happens after a car accident, perhaps nothing has as big of an impact on the outcome as a determination of who was at fault. Fault simply refers to who must assume legal responsibility for the accident and the resulting injuries and costs. Sometimes, fault is very straightforward and everyone is aware that one of the drivers broke the rules of the road and should be held responsible. Other times, it is not clear who was at fault or whether any one driver did anything to be held responsible for. In such cases, things become complicated and it is imperative to understand just what fault means.

The concept of fault arises from the basic premise of most personal injury and tort laws, which stipulate that a party is responsible for damages if he breaches a legal duty. To prove a personal injury or tort civil lawsuit (in most cases), there are four things that an injured plaintiff must prove:

1. That a duty is owed

In the case of car accidents, the duty is the one that all drivers owe to other drivers on the road. If you get behind the wheel of a car, you owe a legal duty to all other drivers to behave with a reasonable standard of care.

2. That a duty was breached

This means that the plaintiff has to prove the defendant was negligent in complying with his duty of care. Since the duty is to behave as a reasonably prudent driver would, the "reasonable person" standard is used as a measure of whether a breach exists in car accidents. This means the behavior of the driver who is supposedly at fault is compared to what a reasonable driver would have done. If a reasonable driver would have been more careful, then the driver in question can be considered negligent and thus can be considered to be (at least partially) at fault.

3. That the breach of duty lead to injuries

It isn't enough for the other driver to have been negligent; that alone won't make him responsible for an accident and injuries. The driver's negligence had to have actually been the direct or proximate cause of the accident, which means that the accident would not have happened if the other driver had been more careful

4. That injuries actually happened that are compensable.

The plaintiff has to show he suffered some loss that the defendant can pay him back for.

If a plaintiff can prove all of these things and show the other driver did something negligent that led to the car accident, it then becomes a personal injury case.

Continued: Car Accidents & Personal Injury Claims

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7. Medical Malpractice
8. Toxic Torts
9. Wrongful Death

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