Gordon Fenderson is an attorney in Jacksonville, Florida specializing in personal injury accident claims and DUI defense. After receiving a degree in Political Science from Appalachian State University, Fenderson went on to earn his J.D. from Florida Coastal School of Law. He is currently the owner of the Fenderson Law Firm, and a member of the Florida Bar, Jacksonville Bar Association, Middle District of Florida, and Florida Justice Association. In this article, he explains how negligence makes people liable for personal injury lawsuits.
To have a successful personal injury lawsuit, what you generally need is to prove negligence on the part of the person or business you are suing. As a general rule, you cannot have a personal injury lawsuit go forward unless someone has been negligent in the case. To better understand what that means, however, you have to know what negligence—in a legal sense—really is.
Looking at this topic from a legal perspective, negligence is basically the combination of four things.
- The duty. Somebody has to have a duty of care.
- The breach. Somebody has to have breached that duty of care.
- The causation. There has to be causation between the injuries that were sustained and the breach in the duty of care.
- The damages. A plaintiff must be able to prove damages in the case in order to recover for his or her loss.
So, when you have got those four things—duty, breach, causation, and the damages—then you have got negligence in your case, and you are ready for the next step.
What people need to understand about negligence is that when you are out in public—whether you are dealing with a business, a person, a government group, a specific place, or just any entity in general, each of these people and groups has a general duty to keep the public safe. And in addition, they have the very basic duty simply to not endanger members of the public at large.
So, for one example, let’s say you have a person who goes into a store and slips or falls on the ground. The store had a general duty to provide a safe environment to customers. So if you went in to that store and there was a slippery floor without any warning sign posted to help you avoid slipping and falling, that would be a problem because the store is supposed to have a general duty to keep their own premises safe and to warn anyone who could be going inside of any looming dangers.
If you, the customer, walks in to the store and does not see a warning sign ahead of the slippery floor, then that store has obviously breached its duty to keep you safe. From there, the issue becomes what happened during the fall. If you have gotten hurt because of your fall, then that means that the store’s breach of duty caused your injuries—also known as causation—since the reason you got hurt was specifically due to the slip or fall for which the store was at fault.
And finally, after you fell down and got hurt inside the store, if you had medical bills or were forced to miss work because of that dangerous fall—on your back, for example—then those monetary issues are known as damages, which were obviously caused by the store’s initial breach of duty.
As the injured party, you are eligible to receive damages to recover the cost of your medical bills, as well as other things such as pain and suffering or lost wages, from the store itself. What you need to collect those, however, is a qualified attorney who can work with you to help build your personal injury case.
