How To Prove Negligence In A Compensation Case

There are tens of thousands of incidents each year where someone gets injured or has their property or vehicle damaged when it wasn’t their fault. If you have been involved in one of these incidents, in many cases you are eligible to receive various compensation and damage rewards to help cover the cost of your medical bills, repairs and replacement of property, loss of earnings, and continued pain and suffering. In order to win the case or to obtain the full compensation that you are entitled to however, you will often need to prove that someone else was negligent. 

 

Here is everything you need to know how to prove the other party’s negligence when you have been involved in an incident that wasn’t your fault.

Sometimes Negligence Is Black And White

There are some incidents where negligence is really obvious and so what you need to do is to provide evidence of that blatant negligence. If for example you’re driving down the street and you stop at a red light and somebody slams into the back of your car, then it is relatively clear that they have been negligent in their care and attention when driving and there’s not really much to be proven. The reasons for their negligence may be investigated by the police to find out if they were intoxicated or if they crashed into you for some other reason but as far as your claim goes, it should be black and white.

 

Use Witness Testimony To Corroborate Your Story

In other situations, it’s not so obvious who was negligent in an incident. For example, when two cars crash at an intersection, the negligent party is clearly the one who ran the red light. It is not unusual, however, for both parties to maintain that their light was green. If there are CCTV cameras at the intersection then they can provide the evidence that is needed but not every intersection has these. In this case, neutral third-party witnesses can give evidence about what they observed so that negligence can be established. The witness may be other drivers who saw the negligent party run the red light or just a bystander who saw what happened.

 

Provide Physical Evidence To Support Your Case 

As well as with eyewitness testimony, you can also prove negligence with the introduction of physical evidence like accident scene photographs, skid marks, and other things of that nature. After an incident, it is always advisable to hire a specialized lawyer and you can visit this website to learn more about the services they can provide. In more complicated cases, your lawyers may hire an accident reconstruction specialist. This specialist will come out and look at the scene and the damage to vehicles and property and reconstruct the incident using their years of experience and training. If they ascertain that you are an innocent victim, they can be a useful witness in court.

 

Identify Dangerous Hazards That Were Responsible

Another type of case where physical evidence is very important is in a premises liability case where you have sustained injuries on someone else’s property. The property owner may try to argue that whatever hazard caused you to trip over and injure yourself, or whatever set of events occurred, was not their fault because the hazard was so obvious that you should have seen it. The court may agree, but they may still judge that if the hazard was so clear to the property owner then they should have dealt with it before someone got hurt.

 

Consider The Use Of Witness Depositions

When you are in a legal dispute after a vehicle crash or some other kind of incident, you not only have to prove who was responsible but also what injuries you have incurred. Usually, this will just be a matter of submitting your medical records but there are more serious cases where a witness deposition is an option. These can be very expensive with it often costing seven or eight hundred dollars an hour to depose a doctor, so your legal team will discuss with you whether it is financially beneficial to get the deposition. If you have suffered serious life-changing injuries where your compensation is potentially huge then a deposition may very well be worth obtaining but in less serious cases, your medical records should suffice. 

Being injured or sustaining a lot of damage to your vehicle or property in an incident that wasn’t your fault can have major negative effects on your health, wealth, and happiness. In many cases, it will be necessary for you to prove that you are the innocent victim of someone else’s negligence in order to obtain the compensation you need to get past the incident. If you are in this situation, take into consideration the points laid out in this article and it will help you to secure the damages you are entitled to.