The Three Things a Personal Injury Claim Needs to Stand
If you have been seriously injured, the fact that you are hurt does not necessarily mean someone else is legally responsible. At the same time, you do not need to understand negligence law before speaking with an attorney.
A useful way to understand a personal injury claim is to think about a tripod.
A tripod needs all three legs to stand. A negligence claim does too:
Breach. Causation. Damages.
If one of those legs is missing, the claim may not stand.
Lawyers technically describe negligence using four elements: duty, breach, causation and damages. For purposes of understanding whether you may have a claim, however, duty and breach can be considered together: Did someone have a legal responsibility to act with reasonable care, and did they fail to do it?
You do not need to figure this out yourself. If you have been injured, Giamanco Law Partners offers a free consultation where you can simply tell an attorney what happened. We can help determine whether the pieces of a potential personal injury claim are there.
The First Leg: Breach — What Did Someone Do Wrong?
Before another person or business can be held responsible for your injury, we generally need to identify something they should have done differently.
That begins with duty. Did that person or business owe you a legal duty under the circumstances?
Drivers, for example, have responsibilities to other people using the road. Businesses have responsibilities concerning the safety of their premises. Professionals and other individuals may have duties that arise from their particular relationships or circumstances.
Breach asks whether the person failed to meet the applicable standard of care.
A driver may have been texting instead of watching traffic. A store may have failed to address a dangerous condition it knew about. A property owner may have failed to reasonably maintain an area used by visitors.
The important point is that an accident alone does not establish negligence.
We need to be able to answer the question: What should this person or business reasonably have done differently?
The Second Leg: Causation — Did That Actually Cause Your Injury?
Proving that someone did something wrong is not enough. Their conduct also has to be connected to the injury for which you are seeking compensation.
Sometimes that connection is straightforward. A driver runs a red light, crashes into another vehicle and breaks the other driver’s leg.
Other cases are considerably more complicated.
What if you already had problems with your back before the accident? What if symptoms did not appear until several days later? What if you were involved in two accidents relatively close together? What if the insurance company agrees its driver caused the collision but argues that the crash could not have caused the medical problems you are experiencing?
Those are causation questions.
Medical records, diagnostic testing, testimony from treating professionals, expert opinions and evidence concerning the accident itself can all become important when causation is disputed.
The Third Leg: Damages — How Did the Injury Affect You?
The third leg is damages.
Personal injury law is intended to compensate an injured person for losses caused by another party’s negligence. That means we need to understand not only what happened to you, but what the injury has actually meant for your life.
Depending on the case, damages may include:
- Medical expenses
- Future medical treatment
- Lost wages or income
- Reduced ability to earn a living
- Pain and suffering
- Disability
- Disfigurement
- Loss of a normal life
- Other financial and personal consequences of the injury
This is one reason it can be dangerous to settle an injury claim too quickly. The full extent of your damages may not be apparent immediately after an accident.
Personal Injury Liability FAQs
Breach simply means that someone who owed a legal duty failed to meet the standard required of them under the circumstances.
It does not necessarily mean that someone intentionally hurt you or even that they knowingly did something dangerous.
Most personal injury claims involve negligence rather than intentional conduct. The question is generally whether a reasonably careful person or business would have acted differently under the circumstances.
No.
Breaking a traffic law or violating a safety requirement can certainly be relevant evidence, but negligence is not limited to situations where someone received a ticket or violated a statute.
Someone may fail to exercise reasonable care without committing a crime or receiving a citation.
It can be important evidence concerning responsibility for the collision, but it does not establish every part of a personal injury claim.
Remember the tripod.
We still need to establish causation and damages. What injuries did the accident cause? What treatment was necessary? Did you miss work? Will you need future care? How has the injury affected your life?
Determining who caused an accident is important. It is not necessarily the end of the analysis.
This is one of the hardest parts of personal injury law to understand.
A terrible injury does not necessarily mean someone else is legally responsible for it.
If nobody breached a duty owed to you, the breach leg of the tripod may be missing, even when the damages are enormous.
That is why the severity of an injury and the existence of liability are separate questions.
Then the opposite problem may exist.
Imagine a driver staring at a phone runs a red light and nearly hits you. The conduct may have been plainly negligent. But if there was no collision, injury or compensable loss, there may be no personal injury claim.
Breach without damages does not complete the tripod.
Causation is still required.
Suppose a business has an unquestionably dangerous broken stair, but a customer suffers an unrelated medical event and falls without ever encountering the defective stair.
There may be negligent property maintenance. There may be a serious injury. But if one did not cause the other, the causation leg is missing.
This distinction becomes particularly important when insurance companies dispute whether an accident actually caused a person’s medical condition.
A preexisting condition does not automatically prevent you from having a personal injury claim.
The important question may be whether the accident caused a new injury or aggravated an existing condition.
These cases can require careful review of medical records and other evidence to distinguish your condition before the accident from what changed afterward.
Do not assume that having a bad back, prior surgery or another existing medical problem means an insurance company has no responsibility for making that condition worse.
Illinois uses a modified comparative negligence system, so responsibility does not always have to be entirely on one side.
Your own conduct may reduce the compensation available to you, and if your share of responsibility reaches the applicable legal threshold, it can prevent recovery.
That makes an honest examination of everyone’s conduct important. Do not assume that being partially responsible automatically means you have no claim.
Not exactly.
Breach is one part of establishing negligence. Liability is the larger conclusion that another party can legally be held responsible for the harm.
Someone may have breached a duty without causing your injury. Or someone may have caused an injury without doing anything legally wrong.
That is why we look at the entire claim rather than one fact in isolation.
Every case is different.
Evidence may include police reports, photographs, surveillance footage, witness statements, medical records, diagnostic testing, employment records, inspection or maintenance records, electronic data and testimony from experts.
The evidence we need depends on which leg of the tripod is disputed.
An insurance company may admit its driver caused a collision but dispute your injuries. In another case, the injuries may be unquestionable while the parties strongly disagree about who was responsible.
Understanding what is actually disputed helps determine what evidence matters.
An insurance company’s opinion is not necessarily the final answer.
Insurers investigate claims with their own financial interests in mind. They may dispute responsibility, causation, the severity of an injury or the amount of compensation being requested.
Before accepting that assessment—or signing a release that permanently resolves your claim—it is worth having an attorney independently evaluate what happened.
There is no reliable formula that can determine the value of every personal injury claim.
The nature and severity of the injury matter, but so do medical treatment, recovery time, lost income, permanent limitations, future medical needs, available insurance coverage, disputed liability and many other circumstances.
A meaningful evaluation requires understanding both how strong the claim is and how significant the damages are.
Absolutely not.
That is the lawyer’s job.
You do not need to call and tell us, “I have established breach, causation and damages.”
Tell us what happened.
An attorney can ask the right questions, identify potential problems and help determine whether your claim has the three legs it needs to stand.
Two Legs Are Not Enough
This is ultimately the easiest way to understand a negligence claim.
Someone did something wrong, but you weren’t hurt? One leg is missing.
You were badly hurt, but nobody did anything wrong? One leg is missing.
Someone behaved negligently and you have significant injuries, but their conduct didn’t cause those injuries? One leg is missing.
A tripod needs all three legs.
Breach. Causation. Damages.
So does a personal injury claim.
Start With a Conversation
You do not need to understand any of these legal terms before contacting Giamanco Law Partners.
If you have been injured and are wondering whether you have a claim, start with a free, no-obligation consultation. Tell us what happened by phone, video call or email. An attorney can listen to your story, answer your questions and help determine whether the elements of a potential claim are present.
There is no pressure to move forward and no obligation to hire the firm. Before signing a release, accepting a settlement or assuming you do not have a case, get enough information to make that decision confidently.
