Cave Springs, AR Personal Injury Lawyer

Personal injury lawyers help victims of all kinds of accidents seek compensation for what happened to them.  Our attorneys can stand up to insurance companies and at-fault defendants to negotiate in good faith.  Then, if they refuse to pay, we can potentially take the case to court to have a jury decide fault and damages.

Our lawyers often settle cases when we can, and lawsuits are not necessary for every case.  In fact, insurance is often in place to help cover injuries, but dealing with insurance can be difficult since the insurance company has its own financial concerns and usually works for the defendant, not you.  Because of this, you should have a lawyer in your corner to fight for you.

For help with your injury case, call our personal injury lawyers right away at (479) 316-0438.

How to Prove Fault in a Personal Injury Case in Cave Springs, AR

Most injury cases can be blamed on someone who acted in a dangerous or negligent way to cause the accident.  While some accidents truly are freak accidents and some are caused by the victim’s own mistakes, other accidents can be blamed on drivers, property owners, product manufacturers, and others who could have prevented the accident through better action.  However, our personal injury lawyers need to prove what they did for the accident to legally qualify as “their fault.”

Fault is usually based on a failure to do something they were required by law to do.  For example, when someone causes a car crash because they were driving drunk, they were in clear violation of DUI laws and can be held accountable.  However, with something like a slip and fall accident or a doctor’s medical malpractice, there are no specific laws on point.

Instead of using a specific law, you can look to what would be reasonable in the given situation.  When you have a relationship with someone – e.g., property owner and guest or doctor and patient – there are certain expectations of how you will act toward each other, and courts can use these expectations to determine what would be “reasonable.”  If someone fails to act reasonably and it results in injuries, that legally qualifies as a breach in the same way a violation of a statute would, and it makes them at fault.

For example, dog owners need to take reasonable care to keep dangerous dogs on a leash and away from people that the dog might injure.  Similarly, restaurant operators need to clean up spills so their customers do not slip.  Another example would be a doctor who needs to run tests and reasonably investigate a patient’s claim of chest pain before turning them away from medical care and saying it is not a heart attack.

All kinds of “breaches” of “legal duties” like these reasonableness standards can produce the fault needed for an injury claim.

Proving Damages in Your injury Case in Cave Springs, AR

On top of proving that the other person was the one who caused the accident, you need to prove that what they did actually resulted in your harm.

Proving Causation

In some cases, there may be intervening causes, and you might actually want to sue a different party.  For example, a driver who was tailgating you and making you nervous might not have actually been responsible for the crash if someone else cut you off and caused you to crash.  Even though they were causing you distress or annoying you, what they did might not be considered a legal cause, and you would instead sue the other driver who.

Proving Non-Economic Damages

As far as damages go, though, something intangible or non-physical like emotional distress can still count as “damages.”  Many of these “non-economic” damages are going to be things like mental anguish, pain and suffering, and other things that have no hard evidence.  Instead, your testimony and the statements from friends, loved ones, and doctors/therapists will be able to show the court how severe the impact on your life has been.  Proof of the physical injuries, such as photos, can also show the jury to some extent how “bad” it was, allowing them to imply how much it hurt you.

Courts use various shorthand techniques to calculate the cost of your non-economic damages, such as using a multiplier applied to the other economic damages in your case or assigning a per-day value for your pain and suffering.

Proving Economic Damages

Other damages are economic and have a hard dollar amount attached to them.  For example, the medical bills you face will have a clear amount on them, and you can produce bills and statements like this as proof of how much your injury cost you financially.  Other damages come from lost wages, which are proven by showing what your pre-injury and post-injury wages were so the court can take the difference between the two.  There also needs to be a projection of how much longer that reduced or eliminated wage will affect you for.  This is based on how long it will take to get back to full working capacity and how much longer until you would have retired if you still had your full paycheck value.

Other incidental damages like ambulance costs, hospital parking, daycare for your kids while you are in the hospital, and the cost of cleaning or laundry services you cannot perform for yourself can also be claimed.

Punitive Damages

Punitive damages can be ordered in court to punish especially dangerous or reckless actions on the part of the defendant, but these damages are not available in every case.  These damages are usually paid to you, but they are meant to punish the defendant rather than reflect how bad your injuries or economic damages were.

Contact Our Personal Injury Attorneys in Cave Springs, AR Today

Contact our personal injury lawyers today at (479) 316-0438 for a free, no-obligation evaluation of your potential accident case.