Getting injured because of another person’s carelessness can leave you in need of significant compensation. After getting medical care, our lawyers can help you file a claim for your personal injuries.
Recovering compensation can be much more challenging than you might suspect. Our team knows what factors must be proven and what evidence will help. We can help show that the defendant owed you a duty of care that they breached when they caused your accident. We can use medical records to show the severity of your injuries and argue that they were foreseeable from the defendant’s misconduct. If the court agrees that the defendant’s negligence caused real damages, you can recover compensation. Damages can be economic, like medical bills and lost wages, as well as non-financial harm, like your pain and emotional suffering.
Call Rice Law today at (803) 219-4906 to get your case reviewed by our Myrtle Beach, SC personal injury lawyers free of charge.
Proving Personal Injury Cases in Red Hill, SC
It takes more than accusing someone of injuring you to prove a personal injury lawsuit. Distinct legal elements must be supported by evidence to prove negligence and recover compensation from a defendant. Our personal injury lawyers can assess your accident to determine if it meets these elements. We will help show that the defendant had a duty of care to you and breached their duty with their negligence. By using evidence, like witness statements and medical reports, our team can prove that the defendant’s breach of duty caused the economic and non-economic damages you are claiming in your lawsuit.
Duty of Care
The first element to address in your lawsuit is what duty of care the negligent party owed you. The duty of care one person owes another often depends on their relationship with each other and the situation in question, no matter if they are complete strangers or know each other personally.
For example, all drivers have a duty to act as other reasonable drivers under similar circumstances to avoid injuries, such as paying attention, staying off their phones, and observing traffic lights and signs. Commercial drivers, like truckers, often have additional duties like how long they can drive that they, and the companies they work for, can be held liable for violating.
Property owners generally have a duty to guests and others they reasonably expect to visit the premises to keep it safe and provide reasonable warnings of known dangers. However, that duty can be transferred to others, like businesses that lease a property, and trespassers are typically owed no duty of care. If you were injured on another’s property, our team can determine who had responsibility for its conditions and your right to be there.
Product designers and manufacturers have a duty to their consumers to make goods free from defects and work as intended. They also have a duty to warn what can happen if a product is used incorrectly and provide instructions for its safe operation.
Doctors, nurses, dentists, and other healthcare professionals owe patients a standard of care that a comparable professional with similar experience, education, and training would provide. Hospitals have a duty to perform background checks and ensure that these professionals have the necessary credentials to do the work.
Breach of a Duty
Once the defendant’s duty of care to you is established, we must show how their actions breached that standard. The misconduct that caused the breach of duty could be unreasonable under the circumstances or a violation of the law.
Drivers breach their duty in numerous ways to cause accidents, like speeding, texting while driving, running red lights, and other unreasonable and illegal behavior. Accident reports and eyewitnesses can provide details that support how the driver was negligent.
Property owners and others breach their duties when they know of a dangerous condition and fail to repair, replace, or warn of it. Perhaps a restaurant failed to clean a spill during the lunch rush but had a reasonable amount of time to discover it before you slipped in it. An apartment building would have breached its duty if it failed to replace faulty handrails on the stairs after reporting the condition.
Designers of products often breach their duty of care when they use materials commonly known in their industry to be dangerous. Product manufacturers can be shown to breach when production goes against the design, negligently assemble the product, or include substandard parts.
Causation
Next, the defendant’s breach must be proven to have caused your accident and that the injuries were foreseeable from the misconduct. This element is typically broken down into “actual” and “proximate” causation.
If your accident would, in fact, not have occurred but for the defendant’s breach of care, they are the actual cause of your accident. Victims would not be T-boned but for other drivers running red lights. A person would not slip and fall in a spill had the property owner cleaned it in a reasonable amount of time. A doctor who negligently fails to diagnose a patient’s condition is the actual cause of their harm.
Defendants are the proximate cause of plaintiffs’ damages if the injuries were a foreseeable result of the breach. In the above example of a T-bone accident, broken ribs, head trauma, and whiplash injuries would be foreseeable from the impact. If a patient’s condition worsens after a misdiagnosis, the negligent healthcare provider is the proximate cause of the foreseeable damages of such a mistake, like additional treatment and testing.
Damages
Lastly, you must demonstrate that the defendant caused you “real” damages. Medical expenses and lost income often account for the bulk of the financial aspect of your damages claim. However, non-financial harm, like physical pain from your injuries and emotional suffering from adjusting to life after the accident, are also considered real damages that should be compensated when negligence is established.
Reach Out to Our Red Hill, SC Personal Injury Attorneys Now to Get Your Claim Started
Contact Rice Law at (803) 219-4906 to receive a free case evaluation with our personal injury attorneys.