In regard to personal injury claims and injuries caused because of someone else’s fault, the biggest issue is what can your legal team prove. As a Plaintiff bringing a personal injury claim, we have the burden of proof to show that the other person was negligent and because of their negligence, you were injured. The law is all about what FACTS we can offer to prove this. Judges and juries don’t care about what we think happened but rather, what can we prove. The burden of proof for a civil lawsuit is that we have to prove the case by a preponderance of the evidence. Basically, this is a lesser standard the criminal standard of beyond a reasonable doubt. However, it still means that we have to show that our version of the facts, that demonstrate the negligence of another person caused your injuries, is more likely to be the truth than not. Reasonable people differ on what they believe, their backgrounds and their perspectives. As a result, the facts that we can truly prove are crucial to succeeding on a personal injury case. Essentially, fault means negligence. Negligence has the following four elements: 1) a legal duty; 2) a breach of that duty; 3) causation, both actual and proximate and; 4) damages resulting from that breach of duty. We have to have all four elements to recover on your personal injury claim. For example, if we can show that a motorist was texting and caused a car wreck, we should be able to recover the damages resulting from the car wreck because the driver was negligent by texting instead of watching the roadway. To use legal terminology, the at-fault driver had a legal duty to keep his vehicle under control, he breached that duty by texting, that breach caused the car wreck which in turn caused the damages (e.g. damage to the car and the injuries to the passengers in the cars).

So for an example involving a slip and fall injury, we have to show that the store owner breached his duty to his customers by creating an unsafe condition (e.g. a wet floor with no warning sign). In contrast, worker’s compensation laws do not require that we show an employer was negligent to recover on the worker’s compensation claim. Rather, the employee’s rights and remedies are set out by legal statutes and in exchange for those legal rights, the employee gives up the right to sue the employer for their possible negligence.