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California Personal Injury Blog

What is a Personal Injury Claim (CA)

By Ralph Curtis
Nov 27, 2023
Personal Injury
personal-injury-claims

A personal injury claim is the legal process to seek compensation from the person(s) whose actions caused your injuries. The claim process involves:

  1. taking the facts of what happened;
  2. applying the relevant laws, and;
  3. adhering to formal legal procedures.

In a personal injury claim, you are claiming someone else’s actions (or inactions) caused your injuries. And in order to get paid for the damages they caused you, you must now pursue an insurance claim.

There are many types of acts that can lead to a personal injury claim, including car accidents being the most common. Personal injury claims may also arise from injuries from dog bites, workplace accidents and even defective products.

What’s Needed to Succeed with a California Personal Injury Claim?

This is what California law requires.

Elements of Negligence

For an injury victim to succeed with any type of personal injury claim, the following elements of negligence must be proven:

  1. A legal duty of care was owed.
  2. The legal duty was breached.
  3. The breach was the proximate cause of the injuries.
  4. The injuries caused the damage.

Now, what are legal duties? Legal duties are created by law.

The appropriate legal duty is what a reasonable person would have done under similar circumstances.

For example, if you were a pedestrian hit by a car while the driver was texting and driving, or drinking and driving, they legally breached their duty drive safely.

Lastly, your attorney must prove that your injuries are a direct result of the breach and a foreseeable consequence of their conduct. For example, a reasonable person is expected to know that speeding is dangerous and could cause a car accident. In this example, the speeding driver would likely be found at-fault for the accident.

Fault in California is different than many other states. California follows the rule of pure comparative fault. This means fault for causing injuries apportions among the responsible people or entities. Each at-fault party is only liable for their percentage of fault.

Even if you’re at partial fault for causing the accident, you can still obtain partial compensation.

As long as you’re not 100% at fault, compensation for an injured person would be for the percentage of fault attributed to the others.

If you have more questions about filing a personal injury claim, contact Curtis Legal Group today and schedule a Free Consultation.