WHAT FACTORS MAKE A PERSONAL INJURY CASE DIFFICULT TO WIN?
There is rarely a perfect personal injury case scenario; every one of them has problems, deficits, holes and issues. The major issue is the question of liability, which means proving that the other person who caused your client’s injury truly at fault, and were they negligent in doing or not doing something that caused injury to your client? The biggest issue can be the question of liability; that is the first threshold, wicket or door we have to go through to get to any possibility of compensation.
If the other person is not at fault or can’t be shown to be at fault within a reasonable degree of certainty, there is no case. There may be injuries and treatments but there is no money and no case. Rarely are there perfect situations that indicate liability from the outset. About the only type of case that comes close to being a slam dunk from the liability side is a rear-end motor vehicle accident because there is never a good reason for one driver to strike another in the rear – none, zero.
The only exception to that would come if the person in front struck and injured the car in the rear, such as they were at a stoplight and the front car backed up for some reason. In a case like that, there may not be any liability on the part of the person in front, because it’s considered reckless driving to back up on a highway in Virginia and a person doing something that is against traffic law is more likely to be found at least partly liable.
When you have two parties at fault and in Virginia, which is a contributory negligence state, if the injured party is even one percent at fault there is absolutely no personal injury case. That means no money, no recovery, no compensation to be had. That can be one of the biggest problems outside of a pure rear end car accident with your client stopped at a light or a stop sign, which is close to perfect a case as you can get for liability. Every other case can result in a struggle to convince an insurance adjuster or eventually a judge or jury that there was complete negligence on the other party’s part and that your client is free of any negligence. That is probably one of the biggest issues in a personal injury case.