Three Questions To Help You Know If Your Personal Injury Case Has Merit

So you became injured on someone else’s property, or in a car accident, or because someone else made a safety mistake. Now what? Many people’s first response may be to sue, but lawyers usually do not find every accident case worth pursuing. So how do you know if you have an actual case that a lawyer will take on? How do you know your personal injury case has merit? Consider the following questions in order to determine if your personal injury case is worth fighting.

Who is Liable?

When someone is liable, it means that person is at fault. It’s important to know who is at fault for your injury, because that determines if you’ll get any compensation. A person is liable if he or she was negligent, and that negligence caused injury. The Legal Information Institute explains negligence as being “a failure to behave with the level of care that someone of ordinary prudence would have exercised under the same circumstances.” If you were in a car accident and the other driver ran a stop sign or was drunk, that person behaved with negligence and is responsible for what happened to you. However, if you were the one who ran the stop sign or you took part in causing the accident in some capacity, you may not have enough of a case to stand on (in fact, in that situation, you may be the liable one). For your personal injury case to have merit, the other person needs to be clearly at fault.

What Are Your Damages?

Damages are ways you are negatively affected by an accident. They pretty much always involve some kind of injury serious enough to require doctor bills and lost wages due to missed work. These are known as economic damages. Other kinds of economic damages include bills for therapies and home medical care. There are also damages that fall under a non-economic umbrella and are related to pain and suffering such as psychological trauma. The value of non-economic damages are tricky to calculate and require a skilled and experienced attorney to fight successfully for you to receive compensation for your pain and suffering.

Did the Accident Cause Your Injuries?

This can be a complicated question, and is often the bulk of the focus in a personal injury lawsuit. If you already had a condition and that condition was exacerbated after an accident, could you say for certain that the accident was the cause of the exacerbation? Or could the condition have become exacerbated on its own? Previous injuries and pre-existing conditions throw quite a wrench into personal injury cases. If you can prove that, without a doubt, your injury was caused solely by an accident caused by the negligence of another party, you have yourself a case.

Considering all the nuances involved in proving a personal injury case, you need an experienced attorney fighting on your behalf. At Goldberg and Chase Law, we work hard to make sure you receive the legal benefits and compensation you deserve. If you find yourself the victim of an accident, consider whether you might have a case and then call an expert lawyer like the ones at Goldberg and Chase so that you can be properly compensated.