Have you been injured?
A personal injury lawyer is someone who specialises in legal cases related to injuries suffered by people as a result of the negligence of others. In some cases it may also be what is called an intentional tort. An intentional tort is an assault, or a deliberate violent act against someone which is known as battery. There are also torts which are unintentional which largely relate to the law of negligence. If you wish to prove a case of personal injury, there are a number of steps that you need to go through. The first step is probably to get a medical report from a qualified professional, that is, a Doctor. The report that the doctor gives should identify the cause of the injury. If the cause of the injury, is a negligence or perhaps a direct act of someone else then there may be a claim of negligence against this other person.
In order to prove negligence, in legal terms, there is a four step process. the first step is to show that there is a duty of care owed to by the defendant to the plaintiff. Commonly a duty of care will arise in such situations as a doctor patient relationship, a solicitor client relationship, the relationship of a teacher and a school pupil or other examples of where a close professional relationship exists between a client and service provider. there is also a general duty of care which is based on concepts of things like proximity to the other person in relational terms or the reasonable scope of the people which are person should have regard to when considering the consequences of their actions. The next step in improving negligence is to show that there was a breach of a duty of care, for a professional the breach will usually only occur if the defendant failed to meet the standard that could reasonably be expected of a reasonable person in thier situation. The next step is to prove that damage was caused to the plaintiff as a result of this breach. Obviously if there was no damage done to the plaintiff then they have no complaint on which to base their action. the final element is called causation, which means that the breach of the defendant needs to have caused the damage suffered by the plaintiff and this is a notoriously difficult concept to define. However the caselaw has often stated that it must be proven ‘but for’ the actor or omission of the defendant the plaintiff would not have suffered the damage that they did.
If you have a question about personal injury law, you may wish to contact us using the contact form to the right or by chatting to one of our lawyers online now. Alternatively, you can post your question to the question box of bottom of this page and some one should answer you immediately.