Personal injuries can affect victims physically, mentally, emotionally, and financially. When someone else causes those injuries, deciding whether to pursue legal action to recover compensation can feel overwhelming. That is why we have provided a comprehensive guide of what you need to know if you are considering filing a personal injury lawsuit in Maryland.
The first step is identifying who may be responsible for causing your injuries. Proving responsibility will typically require you to satisfy the four elements of negligence: duty of care, breach of duty, causation, and damages. Damages can include compensation for medical expenses, lost wages, and pain and suffering. However, you may not be able to recover if you are found to be contributorily negligent for your injuries. In any case, you likely only have three years from the date you sustained your injuries to file your lawsuit, so you must act quickly.
Call our Baltimore personal injury lawyers at (410) 694-7291 for a free consultation from Rice Law.
What Are the Signs You Might Have a Personal Injury Case?
We can determine whether or not you have a personal injury case by assessing the facts of your accident. Signs that you can pursue compensation include a clear-cut chain of events and sustaining serious injuries that require expensive medical care.
Clear-Cut Chain of Events
When accidents are relatively clear-cut, like motor vehicle accidents involving a drunk driver or premises liability incidents due to egregiously poor property maintenance, leaving witnesses and other concrete evidence, that is a good sign you have a reason to file a personal injury claim.
Tell our lawyers if the at-fault party made any statements to you at the scene, such as apologizing for their conduct, as this information can help us prepare your case.
Serious Injuries
Sustaining a serious injury due to negligence is a sign that you may have a personal injury claim. Broken bones, traumatic brain injuries, and internal injuries are among some often the most common and serious injuries that warrant compensation from a liable party.
What to Do if You Have a Personal Injury Case in Maryland?
We can confirm whether you have a personal injury case by determining whether negligence was present and identifying the negligent party who would be liable in a lawsuit.
Determine Whether There Was Negligence
In any personal injury case, another party’s negligence is the most common cause of the plaintiff’s injuries. Negligence is the failure to exercise the appropriate level of care, which results in injury to the victim.
Identify the Negligent Party
When planning to file a personal injury case in Maryland, you must first determine who the defendant (or defendants) will be in your case. The defendant is the person or entity responsible for negligently causing your injuries.
Correctly identifying the negligent party may be difficult, particularly in cases involving multiple parties, such as a multi-vehicle car accident, so it helps to get a lawyer.
Prepare to Prove Negligence
In order to succeed in a personal injury lawsuit under a theory of negligence, the plaintiff will have to prove four separate elements. These elements are duty of care, breach of duty, causation, and damages. The plaintiff must prove each element by a “preponderance of the evidence,” which essentially means that the alleged negligence was substantially more likely than not the cause of the injuries.
What Do You Have to Prove if You Have a Personal Injury Case?
When considering whether a particular party was responsible for your injuries, we can apply the four elements of negligence to the facts of your case. These four elements will be necessary to prove your case in court.
Duty of Care
A legal duty of care arises when one party owes a legal responsibility to another. In a vacuum, no one person owes a duty to another. However, there are many situations where duty arises. For instance, drivers on public roads owe a duty to other drivers, passengers, cyclists, and pedestrians within their sphere of influence. Property owners, such as retail chains and restaurants, owe a duty to the patrons they invite onto their property. Teachers owe a duty to students, doctors owe a duty to patients, and so on.
The nature of the duty owed depends on the parties’ relationships and the field’s common practice. The standard of care owed often differs based on the circumstances. For instance, doctors owe a substantially higher level of care to patients than most others who owe duties because doctors receive substantial training before being allowed to practice, and patients are particularly vulnerable when in the care of doctors. Vulnerability also plays a role in determining the standard of care in other circumstances, such as those involving common carriers, like airlines.
Proving the standard of care for a particular relationship often requires expert testimony from another professional in the same area as the defendant, who can attest to what they might have done in the same circumstances. Your Towson personal injury lawyer can obtain expert witnesses for you to demonstrate what the standard of care should have been in your case.
Breach of Duty
Once you have established the standard of care that the defendant owed you, you must also show that the defendant failed to meet that standard of care. This is referred to as “breach of duty.”
You do not have to point to a specific action to demonstrate breach of duty in a negligence case. You can also use the defendant’s failure to act to show breach. For instance, if the defendant was a property owner who knew of a hazardous condition and failed to notify guests (e.g., by posting a “wet floor” sign), their inaction would constitute a breach of duty.
Causation
If a defendant owed a duty and breached it, they were negligent, but that is not enough to recover in a personal injury case. You must also show that the defendant’s negligence was both the direct and proximate cause of the accident and resulting injuries.
Negligence is the direct cause of the injuries when the negligence is a “substantial factor” in bringing about the injury. This is different than the “but for” test that many other states use. As an example of direct causation, let’s say that Car A and Car B both run red lights from different sides of an intersection and collide with Car C. In a “but for” state, neither Car A nor Car B would be liable, since the accident would have happened anyway if either one were not present. However, in a substantial factor test state (such as the one used in Maryland), both can be found liable as they both factored into the plaintiff’s injuries.
As you can tell, causation can be a complicated element to prove in a personal injury case for negligence. Your Annapolis personal injury attorney can work with you to help you understand the requirements of the causation element in your particular case.
Damages
Damages is the term that lawyers use to describe the actual consequences of your injuries that were caused by another person’s negligence. Remember, when you file a personal injury lawsuit, you are aiming to recover compensation that reflects the harm you have suffered. If your injuries do not present an opportunity for recovery, you will not be able to recover in your lawsuit.
Do You Have a Personal Injury Claim if You Share Fault in Maryland?
While Maryland law does feature the plaintiff-favoring substantial factor test as noted above, plaintiffs must also, unfortunately, deal with the state’s antiquated contributory negligence rule. Maryland is one of only five states that still employs contributory negligence, a defense commonly asserted by defendants in personal injury cases.
Understanding Contributory Negligence
According to Maryland’s contributory negligence theory, a personal injury plaintiff will not be able to recover in their lawsuit if the plaintiff is shown to be even partially responsible for their own injuries. This contrasts with the comparative negligence theories of other states, which allow for a reduction of compensation based on the percentage of fault. In Maryland, if the plaintiff is even 1% to blame for their injuries, they will be barred from recovery.
Applying Contributory Negligence
For example, let’s say that Driver A fails to stop at a stop sign and collides with Driver B in an intersection. Driver A would typically be proven negligent and therefore liable for Driver B’s injuries. If, however, Driver B was shown not to be wearing a seat belt at the time of the accident, a Maryland court could determine that Driver B was contributorily negligent and therefore barred from recovery for their injuries.
How to Know Your Damages in a Personal Injury Case
Once you have established that the defendant’s negligence caused your injuries, you will have the opportunity to show how the injuries have impacted your life for the purposes of compensation. You must show damages in order to file your lawsuit. When you file your claim, you will allege these damages, so it is important that you identify all possible damages ahead of your lawsuit.
Medical Expenses
You will win compensation based on your harms in a number of different areas. For one, you will be able to collect compensation in line with any medical expenses you incurred as a result of your injuries. Some compensable medical expenses include hospital stays, emergency procedures, surgeries, prescription medication, and rehabilitative physical therapy.
Lost Wages
You can also recover for any lost wages due to missed time at work while recovering from your injuries. If your condition prevents you from performing the requirements of your job for an extended period of time or indefinitely, you may be compensated accordingly for your decreased earning power. You may even be compensated for any paid time off that you take while recovering.
Pain and Suffering
It is also important to recognize the ways in which the injuries impact you outside of the direct financial costs. While the physical, mental, and emotional distress that you may experience as a result of your injuries may not be financial in nature, you will likely be able to achieve a proportional financial recovery through damages. Maryland law recognizes that the pain and suffering your injuries are likely to cause was the defendant’s fault and will award damages accordingly.
For a full picture of your potential damages in your Maryland injury lawsuit, sit down with one of our Columbia personal injury lawyers as soon as possible.
How to Make Sure You Bring a Personal Injury Case Within the Statute of Limitations
To file your personal injury case in Maryland, you will need to adhere to the appropriate time limit. You do not have forever to file your lawsuit. In Maryland, personal injury plaintiffs generally have three years from when they knew, or should have reasonably known, of their injuries to file their lawsuit. If you fail to file your claim within the statute of limitations, the court will most likely throw your lawsuit out before you have the chance to make your case.
Learn the Statute of Limitations
In most cases, the three-year time limit starts when you sustain your injury. However, there are certain situations where this becomes less clear. For instance, if you were exposed to toxic chemicals or other hazardous substances that the defendant did not tell you about, the statute of limitations will start to run once you discover your injuries and their cause.
See if an Exception Applies
There are other instances where exceptions to the three-year limit may apply. For instance, if the injury victim was a minor at the time of the injury, they will have three years from the day when they reach maturity (typically, their 18th birthday) to file their lawsuit. If the defendant is a government entity or agency, you must meet notification requirements that differ between jurisdictions and will actually shorten your time limit.
Start Immediately
Preparing and filing a personal injury lawsuit can take time. This is particularly true where the injuries are complex and serious or where there is more than one defendant to be named in the claim. Avoid the consequences of filing late by contacting one of our Maryland personal injury attorneys today.
When is it Difficult to Know Whether You Have a Personal Injury Case?
It’s often difficult to know whether you have a personal injury case, especially if the accident was complicated, your injuries are invisible, or you don’t consult an experienced attorney.
Chaotic Accidents
Knowing whether you have a personal injury case after a very complex accident involving multiple parties is often more difficult. It becomes even harder if you didn’t see the other party’s negligent conduct yourself. We can help you after a chaotic accident, interviewing eyewitnesses, investigating the incident, and determining liability.
Minor Injuries
Victims sometimes think their injuries aren’t serious enough to warrant a personal injury lawsuit. In reality, you shouldn’t have to pay any expenses from an injury due to negligence, no matter how small or great. The accident wasn’t your fault, so you still deserve compensation.
Invisible Injuries
Invisible and internal injuries are common from slip and falls, car crashes, and medical malpractice. Victims don’t always notice these injuries right away, as they can’t see them and may be in shock with adrenaline and stress. You can still file a personal injury lawsuit for an internal or invisible injury in Maryland, and it helps to get assessed, even if you only feel slight discomfort or pain.
FAQs About Determining Whether or Not You Have a Personal Injury Case in Maryland?
How Long Do You Have to Learn Whether You Have a Personal Injury Case?
Most personal injury lawsuits must be filed within three years of the accrual date, which is typically the date of the accident. The accrual date might be delayed if the victim was injured as a minor or only discovered their injuries later.
What Evidence Tells You Whether You Have a Personal Injury Case?
Witness statements, security footage, medical records, and photographs help us determine whether a victim has cause to file a personal injury claim and seek damages from the defendant.
How Do You Determine Your Damages from a Personal Injury Case?
To determine the compensation you deserve, our attorneys can add up all your economic damages, such as missed wages and medical bills. We will also factor in your non-economic damages for pain, suffering, and other intangible harms you endured.
What if You Share Fault for a Personal Injury?
You cannot file a personal injury lawsuit and get damages if you share fault for an accident, as Maryland is a pure contributory fault state. Because of this, be careful not to apologize for the incident.
When Should You Learn Whether You Have a Personal Injury Case?
You should learn whether you have a personal injury case immediately after an accident so that our lawyers may file your claim sooner and recover the damages you need as quickly as possible.
How Does Medical Evidence Help You Learn if You Have a Personal Injury Claim?
Medical evidence proves the severity of your injury and can help you decide whether or not you think filing a personal injury lawsuit is worth it in Maryland.
What Happens if You Don’t Know You Have a Personal Injury Case?
If you don’t know you have reason to file a personal injury case, you risk missing the statute of limitations entirely and failing to recoup all the damages you deserve.
We Can Help if You Need More Info on Your Personal Injury Case in Maryland
Get a free case review from Rice Law by calling our Maryland personal injury lawyers at (410) 694-7291.