The legal system has the ability to weed out claimants with frivolous lawsuits. It requires each potential plaintiff to provide proof of the defendant’s negligence. The questions that need answers include Who was negligent and careless?
Elements needed to prove liability in the traditional method for a personal injury trial
• Evidence that the defendant had a duty of care with respect to the plaintiff
• Evidence that the defendant breached that same duty of care
• Proof that the defendant caused the plaintiff’s injuries
• Evidence that the plaintiff’s injuries caused him or her to suffer real damage.
How the traditional method differs from each of the various alternative methods?
If the plaintiff can show that the defendant acted with intent, then the court no longer needs to see evidence for each of the 4 elements that have been listed above. Defendants that have acted intentionally automatically become responsible for any resulting damage.
A defendant’s commission of what is known as an unexcused violation provides the court with a reason for suspending the demand for each of the 4 elements that have been listed above. An unexcused violation is one that causes any witnesses to come forward, in order to support any target of the defendant’s violation.
For instance, suppose that a man sped through a red light, in order to keep from stopping. If that action caused the impatient driver to come close to hitting a pedestrian, there might be more than one witness approaching that same pedestrian. Each of them would have recognized the commission of an unexcused violation.
The final alternative method gets applied most frequently to cases brought by someone with claims about a defective product. This last method removes the need for the plaintiff to show all 4 of the traditional elements. Still, the plaintiff must show that the defective product did indeed injure him or her. In addition, the plaintiff must show that the defendant should have foreseen the plaintiff’s injury. Sometimes, a manufacturing company has realized that a given product can prove dangerous in certain situations. Still, it might fail to place a suitable warning sign on that same product.
That failure serves as a type of negligence. If a consumer buys the item that lacks a warning label and then gets injured, the manufacture can be charged with causing a personal injury. The victim’s injury was foreseeable. Various situations can put an unsuspecting person in danger and, thus, cause him or her to sustain a personal injury. In each situation some person, company or organization has acted in a careless and neglectful manner. In any of those same situations, the careless and neglectful party did not hesitate to carry out some type of negligent behavior.