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Your serious personal injury doesn’t only affect you. When you’re hurt because of someone else’s negligence, the lives of your family members are affected, too. The person or people responsible for your injury must be held accountable for their actions. That way, they won’t hurt anyone else the same way they hurt you.
A Sacramento personal injury lawyer from our firm can help you recover compensation for all you and your family have suffered. Schedule a free consultation by calling our office today.
When you’ve been seriously injured in Sacramento, the type of injury or accident matters less than the fact that negligence played a role. There are thousands of ways a person can be injured. If someone caused your accident because of his or her failure to take your safety into account, it’s very likely you have a viable Sacramento personal injury case.
The following are some of the more common types of personal injury cases we handle:
Any kind of injury can qualify you to pursue personal injury compensation in Sacramento, as long as you suffered damages and your injury was the result of someone else’s negligence. Here’s a list of serious injuries that are often involved in Sacramento personal injury claims:
Workplace injuries often result from strain, repetitive motion, and dangerous equipment. Lifting heavy items can injure a person’s shoulder, neck, or back. Falling off a ladder can result in broken bones and head trauma. Repetitive motion injuries can permanently injure tendons, nerves, muscles, and ligaments.
Car accidents often result in one of two types of injuries: impact, or penetrating injuries. Impact injuries include head trauma from being thrown around in the vehicle. Penetrating injuries include cuts and lacerations from broken glass or items flying around during the crash.
Medical malpractice is a wide category and can result in numerous injuries depending on the individual circumstances. However, some common medical malpractice injuries involve incorrect medication or dosages, birth injuries, improper conduct (such as leaving a tool inside a patient after surgery), or simple failure to diagnose a patient.
Premises liability accidents are another wide category. Slip-and-fall incidents can result in head trauma, broken bones, and spinal injuries. Dog (or another animal) bites usually result in puncture wounds, broken bones, scarring, and, depending on the speed of treatment, infection. Nerve and tissue damage are also common.
Following a personal injury in Sacramento, you can pursue compensation for your losses by suing the at-fault party. That could be a person, but it could also be a company, an organization, or even a government agency in California or Sacramento. In many cases, the party you’re suing will have an insurance company to protect it from financial liability.
For example, if you’re seeking compensation from a negligent driver following a serious car crash, that driver’s insurance company will likely be the one to pay for your damages. If your personal injury was caused by the negligence of a business, the business will likely also have an insurer you must negotiate with to recover compensation.
In either case, if you attempt to negotiate with insurance companies on your own, chances are you won’t come out on top. Insurance companies have attorneys and adjusters who will do everything they can to lower the value of your claim. They have a variety of tactics to accomplish this goal, such as placing blame on you.
Unfortunately, despite the fact that your money keeps them in business, even your own insurance company may do everything in its power to give you the lowest sum possible for your claim. Insurance companies are for-profit businesses and awarding you the amount you deserve for your claim is not in their financial best interest.
One way to prevent them from winning is having a legal team of your own. Your Sacramento injury injury lawyer can negotiate for you, and we can even handle all communications on your behalf. We won’t let them take advantage of you, and we will do everything we can to ensure you don’t have to accept an unfair settlement amount.
So, who is liable for your claim? In a legal context, the word liability just means accountability, often for an accident or injury.
California is a fault state, which means that the person who committed a negligent act and caused an accident or subsequent injury will be liable for the resulting damages. Here’s what you need to know about liability as a Sacramento personal injury victim.
Negligence refers to a person’s failure to do something that a reasonable person, guided by those considerations that ordinarily regulate conduct, would do, or an action that a prudent or reasonable person would not do.
There are three main categories of negligence: gross negligence, comparative negligence, and vicarious liability.
Gross negligence is the most serious of the three. Gross negligence is an extreme lack of care, or extreme departure from the way a prudent person would behave in a given situation.
Some examples of gross negligence include:
Comparative negligence describes a scenario where the fault is shared by multiple people or parties.
When comparative negligence comes into play, the percentage of fault becomes very important. A person who is found to be 30 percent at fault in a personal injury claim will suffer lighter consequences and be able to recover more damages than someone found 70 percent at fault.
Vicarious liability is a little more complex than gross negligence or comparative negligence and can be more difficult to identify. An example of vicarious liability can be found with companies and their employees, or parents and their children.
More specifically, let’s say a 12-year-old child steals their parents’ car and crashes into a parked vehicle. The child’s parents would be liable for the damages the child caused, given that the child is their dependent, and has no financial resources of their own.
Proving that someone is guilty of negligence often requires four things: duty of care, breach of duty, causation, and damages. Negligence must be proven for a personal injury case to be valid, and these four elements must be present to prove that negligence occurred.
Duty of care is the concept that every individual must use reason and prudence in whatever situation they may be in, to ensure the safety of themselves and those around them. For our purposes, a prudent person would follow the rules of the road when behind the wheel to ensure their safety and the safety of other drivers.
Breaching duty of care occurs when an individual fails to use reason. For example, if a driver chooses to disobey the rules of the road by intentionally going through a light after it has turned red, that is the breaching duty of care, as it puts themselves and other drivers at risk.
Causation is the real harm caused by a breach of duty of care. If our example driver runs a red light, they run the risk of hurting someone else. Let’s say, in this case, they hit another vehicle that is making a legal turn.
Damages
