How Does Personal Injury Law Define Duty of Care?

You have to prove that someone breached the duty of care if you want to hold someone liable in a personal injury case. For that you need to understand the concepts of duty of care and negligence if you want to sue someone successfully for a personal injury accident.

What is Duty of Care?

A duty of care is someone’s legal responsibility to act appropriately towards others to avoid injuring them. Everyone, especially drivers, has a duty of care. Failure to obey the duty of care principle may make them liable in a personal injury accident.

Think about it this way. If you drive and run a stop sign or red light, you’re guilty of breaching your duty of care if you hit another driver. You’ll have to pay for the other driver’s property damage and bodily injuries since a reasonable person in your situation wouldn’t have run a red light or stop sign. They would have taken care but you did not so that led to the accident.

Some professionals, like doctors, are held to a higher standard of duty of care, legally speaking. What applies to professionals and the general public is also true for business owners. So, if you own a nail salon and don’t put a rug outside on a snowy day, and a customer has a slip and fall accident while entering your store, you’re liable since you breached your duty of care.

Breach of Duty of Care

You have to prove that four things exist to prove a breach of duty of care:

• A duty of care existed
• The duty was breached
• Damages and injuries resulted
• The breach of duty of care was what caused the damages and injuries.

A person is guilty of negligence when he or she breaches his or her duty of care towards someone. However, it is the duty of the personal injury lawyer in Oakville to pin liability by providing that the duty of care was breached and that led to the accident.

How Does a Breach of Duty of Care Case Lead to a Personal Injury Case?

Suppose you ride the bus to work daily and are injured when the bus driver is distracted. You can win a settlement from the driver and the bus company if you prove that a breach of duty existed, which it does in this instance. You also have to prove that the breach of duty of care led to your injuries. That will be easy to do since you suffered from a whiplash injury in this instance. But trying to prove all of this is not possible if you think about representing yourself. You need a good lawyer in your corner to win damages.