Defenses That Might Be Used By Defendant In Personal Injury Case

If you have filed a personal injury claim with an insurance company, you should expect that same company to furnish the defendant with a way to fight your allegations. The defendant’s legal counsel might utilize any of several standard defenses.

The defendant’s legal counsel might claim that the plaintiff was partly at fault for the accident, or for the resulting injury. Those investigating a claim will always check to see if the plaintiff was wearing a seat belt. The absence of a seat belt can be pointed to as a factor that contributed towards creation of the injury. How should the plaintiff respond to such an argument? It helps to have the opinion of a medical expert. That expert might be able to show that the driver or passenger would have sustained the injury, even if he or she had been wearing a seat belt.

Failure to mitigate injury

Personal Injury Lawyer in Barrie knows that every victim has the duty to mitigate an injury by seeing a doctor as soon as possible. A victim/plaintiff that has delayed meeting with a physician does make it possible for the defense team to point to the plaintiff’s failure to follow-through on his or her obligation.

Assumption of risk

The defense team could call attention to the fact that the plaintiff had chosen to take part in an activity that had an inherent risk, or had been linked to the existence of a recognized danger. In that case, the defendant could not be made responsible for an accident-related injury, because the plaintiff had been warned about the danger.

Yet not every accident that takes place at a risk-filled location has resulted from the presence of a recognized danger. It might have been caused by an overlooked threat. Take, for example, the dangers that can cause a head injury to a football player.

That danger has arisen from the helmet’s failure to prevent the development of every sort of brain disorder. A football player might butt heads with an opponent, and that action might trigger development of a brain disorder.

Although that possibility has been recognized, any player might get injured in some other fashion. Some unrecognized object on the field might cause the player to trip and fall. That fall might lead to development of a serious injury.

Objects of a football field would not get placed in a listing of recognized dangers. The field is supposed to be clear. Yet if it proved otherwise, a player might suffer the consequences. Those would be consequences that did not result from the existence of a known risk.

That example illustrates both the basis of the standard defense, and how it might be misinterpreted, or misused. Such defenses should be questioned.