Need Of An Injury Lawyer’s Expertise In California’s Personal Injury Cases

In California, personal injury lawsuits arise in many ways, and the expertise of an experienced injury lawyer is always needed because in most occasions, an accident causing injury involves a situation in which both the parties to the lawsuit are at some fault. As most California personal injury lawsuits are not such wherein one party is to blame completely, laws of the state handle the situation with a legal concept called comparative negligence.

Your lawyers should be aware of how the concept of comparative negligence works, what needs to be done if you or your loved one is injured in an accident, and how the concept generally applies in a personal injury lawsuit

Brief history of comparative negligence in California

Comparative negligence concept began to be applied in California cases in its contemporary form since 1975. The case involved traffic accident in which the plaintiff had made a turn across three lanes of traffic and in this act, the defendant’s vehicle had struck him as it was speeding. Till that point, the provisions of the law in California can be described as all or nothing, i.e. either the plaintiff proved their point and recovered all the money damages; however, even if the plaintiff was partially at fault, they were not entitled to nothing.

After the new concept of comparative negligence was applied in one of the personal injury cases in 1975, the plaintiff was now allowed to recover damages on what is known as comparative fault standard. This offshoot of the comparative negligence concept has been altered leading to the formulation of the comparative fault standard used nowadays.

Needless to say, your lawyer should be well versed in this concept in order to negotiate well during a settlement and of course, when taking the guilty party to trial.