The investigation of an accident does not always show that a single person ought to be saddled with all the blame for that same accident. Sometimes both of the involved parties must bear some responsibility for what happened. If a defense lawyer can produce proof of shared responsibility, the size of the claimant’s award gets reduced.
The size of that reduction depends on the degree to which the plaintiff should be held partly responsible for the unfortunate, accident-triggering events. Still, the lawyer for the plaintiff feels obligated to win a fair compensation for his or her client. Hence, that same personal injury lawyer in Kitchener must acquire an understanding of the different types of negligence.
Elements of comparative negligence
If the victim of an accident has been found comparatively negligent, then he or she has contributed in some way (even a small way) to the occurrence of a given accident. If a defense lawyer can produce proof of that fact, the defendant can be freed from any charge of liability. The amount of compensation available to the plaintiff then depends on certain details, with respect to the plaintiff’s degree of responsibility.
If the case ends with a ruling of pure comparative negligence, the victim retains the right to seek some compensation, regardless of the degree to which that same victim was at fault for what took place. In a case with a ruling of modified comparative negligence, the size of the victim’s award cannot go past a certain limit, if the extent of the victim’s role in triggering an accident has exceeded a specific and stated level.
Elements of contributory negligence
Here the amount of fault gets divided among all the parties that were involved in a given accident. In this case, the plaintiff might be declared partly responsible for the damages and the injuries that had resulted from the accident’s occurrence. That would be true, even though the partly responsible plaintiff was also the victim.
In this case, the size of the victim’s compensation would get reduced. The extent of that reduction would depend on the degree to which the victim had created an accident-prone setting. The percent of the victim’s responsibility would signal the proportion of the award that the same victim gets denied.
Questions that aid determination of degree that victim was responsible for accident
Had the victim acted to protect his or her own safety? According to the legal system, each person has the right to protect his or her own safety. Had the victim acted to protect the safety of others? A passenger injured in a collision will get a reduced compensation if that same passenger had distracted the driver, thus endangering the safety of others.