How Does A Determination of Fault Get Made?

Once an insurance company has received a personal injury claim, it needs to focus on the issue of liability. That involves determining who should be held liable for the reported accident.

Who demonstrated the appropriate level of care?

Considering all of the adults that were involved in the accident, the insurance company would ask this: Who was least careful? If one of 2 parties should be held responsible, the question becomes who was less careful. The person held liable for the accidental occurrence must pay at least some of the damages. Sometimes the plaintiff has been a bit careless. When that is the case, then the same plaintiff becomes responsible for paying a portion of the damages.

Examples of the sort of carelessness that can cause someone to get injured

Failure to be in the appropriate spot at the time of the accident: For example, someone that got injured after wandering into a restricted and dangerous area on a construction site would not have grounds for accusing the property owner of carelessness. Only construction workers should enter such a location.

Not taking the proper precautions: For instance, someone that got injured after wearing sandals, while visiting an area that was known to be rocky, could not sue the group that had control of that same area. A reasonable person would have donned a sturdy pair of shoes. An employer that fails to provide an employee with adequate training or instructions: In the absence of that training/instruction, the employee carries out a dangerous action and causes an accident.

An employer fails to provide employees with a sufficient amount of safety equipment, and thus causes one or more employees to get injured. The employee’s actions could not be blamed for the injury. The safety equipment was supposed to protect the hired workers.

Not ensuring proper maintenance of a given property: For example, someone gets injured when a stairway’s railing breaks, as that particular individual walks down the stairs. The Personal Injury Lawyer in Barrie knows that a property owner would have to pay the damages, because that same property owner had failed to maintain all the elements on the stairway.

A company puts a defective product on the market: That might happen if someone working in the company’s plant made a mistake, and, thus, aided creation of a defective product. That could also happen if a store failed to alert customers to the precautions that should be made by someone that intended to use the marketed item.

Companies are supposed to check for defects. If the process that had been put in place for checking products does not ensure the identification of a defect, then the company that had chosen to use such a process could be deemed careless.