What is negligence?
The law requires us to act with “reasonable care”. The specifics of what constitutes reasonable care vary somewhat from state to state and from situation to situation. When someone fails to act with the reasonable care required by a given circumstance, that’s negligence. That’s important to you because in order to recover for most personal injuries, you’ll have to prove that another person or a business was negligent, and that the negligence caused your injuries.
Applying negligence to hold someone liable for an injury is to say that someone failed to act or take the proper action that would normally be reasonable or ordinarily prudent under the same circumstance. If a person accused of negligence fails to act properly, in a normal responsible manner, and or fails to uphold a “normal” behavior in a professional or legal manner, which caused an injury or death, that person may be charged with negligence. Sometimes you may hear the term “medical negligence.” This may apply to a medical professional who performs below acceptable standards or deviates from normal practice resulting in an injury to the patient.
Negligence is any careless behavior that causes, or contributes to, an accident. For most types of accidents, a person must be negligent in order to be held legally responsible for another person’s injuries. A person is considered negligent if he or she had a duty to act carefully and failed to do so. (Generally, we all have an obligation to act with ordinary and reasonable care in any given situation that is, in a manner that will not foreseeably injure those around us.) For example, a person would be negligent if she drove at night wearing sunglasses, because any reasonable driver would know that doing so would increase the chances of causing a traffic accident. If a person behaves negligently and that behavior causes you harm, you can most likely recover compensation for your injuries.
Simply put, negligence involves doing something a reasonably prudent person would not do – or the failure to do something a reasonably prudent person would do under the same or similar circumstances. Lawyers prove negligence through careful investigation and evaluation of all the evidence. It general, negligence involves careless behavior toward the safety of others. For example, a careful driver would obey the traffic lights at an intersection while a negligent driver would not.
The standard of care in a personal injury case is how a “reasonable person” was expected to act in the particular situation that caused the injury. A person is negligent when he or she fails to act like an “ordinary reasonable person” would have acted. The determination of whether a given person has met the “ordinary reasonable person” standard is often a matter that is resolved by a jury after presentation of evidence and argument at trial.
