After you are injured in a car accident, you may pursue a personal injury action to recover compensation. The injuries from your accident can impact many areas of your life, both personally and professionally.
As you recover from your injuries, the medical bills may start coming in. Outside of the medical costs, you might miss work or be forced to quit your job while you recover, depriving you of wages.
Additionally, the mental and emotional trauma after a car accident can last a lifetime. You may seek counseling or therapy to handle the psychological aspects of the accident.
The point is that the overall cost to you after a car accident can be significant. A successful personal injury claim can provide you with compensation to cover these losses, but to succeed you must prove negligence.
How do I prove negligence?
Negligence is the legal concept behind personal injury actions. There are four pieces to proving negligence in a car accident case:
- Duty
- Breach
- Causation
- Damages
All New Jersey drivers have a legal duty to drive reasonably and safely. This means following the traffic laws and not engaging in dangerous behavior, such as aggressive driving.
There are many ways this duty could be breached. Speeding, distracted driving and drunk driving are examples of breaching the duty to drive safely.
Once you have evidence that the other driver breached their duty, you must prove this breach caused your accident. The breach must be the actual cause of your accident, such as a driver failing to stop at a red stoplight and smashing straight into you, and the proximate cause.
Proximate cause means the drivers breach was a substantial contributing factor to the accident.
The final step in proving negligence is establishing your damages. This is the amount you are asking for in compensation.
For example, if you claim you have $10,000 in medical expenses because of the accident, you must produce documentation backing up this number. Documentation can include medical bills or prescription receipts.
Modified comparative negligence
However, along with proving these four elements, you must be prepared to defend yourself against accusations of your own negligence.
New Jersey follows a modified comparative negligence rule. This means that compensation is awarded according to each driver’s own percentage of fault.
Many car accidents involve some negligence on the part of each driver. Perhaps the other driver missed the red light and crashed into you, but what if you were speeding through the green light you had?
The other driver may argue that if you had been driving the speed limit, your two cars would not have been in the middle of the intersection at the same time and collided, or you would have noticed their car and been able to stop in time.
Building the strongest possible case
Reducing your percentage of negligence is extremely important because under the modified comparative negligence law, if your own negligence is found to be 50% or higher, you will receive nothing in compensation.
Even if your own negligence is determined to be under 50%, your compensation will be reduced by your percentage of negligence.
As you can imagine, proving the other driver’s negligence while minimizing your own can get complicated. Knowing the right strategies and gathering the right evidence increases your chance of getting the desired result.
