Personal Injury Lawyer Baltimore Frequently Asked Questions I

Start with the basics and familiarize yourself with the elements in a personal injury case by looking at Personal Injury Lawyer Baltimore Frequently Asked Questions information below.

How to prove fault in personal injury claims other than automobile accidents.

Personal Injury Lawyer Baltimore Frequently Asked Questions

To pursue a claim against another party for unintentionally causing an injury, a Personal Injury Lawyer Baltimore must prove that another has been negligent. Negligence is the legal word for carelessness. The legal definition of negligence For a Personal Injury Lawyer Baltimore requires four elements:

• that there is a legal duty owned to you by the other party
• that the party breached that duty to you
• that as a result of said breach of duty you sustained injuries
• that those injuries were caused by the negligent action or breach of duty

For a Personal Injury Lawyer Baltimore a more simple definition is that the person who caused the injuries did not act in a normal way in which a reasonable person would act under similar circumstances. For a Personal Injury Lawyer Baltimore Negligence can occur in many different circumstances. For a Personal Injury Lawyer Baltimore if an accident is caused on property that is dangerous because it is poorly built or maintained, the owner of the property is liable for being careless in maintaining the property, regardless of whether he or she actually created the dangerous condition.

For example, if you are on someone else’s property either as a visitor or a tenant and are doing business on the property, the owner of that property has a responsibility to keep the premises properly maintained. If that owner knows or should have known about a dangerous or defective condition but fails to remedy the situation in a timely manner despite adequate time, he/she is liable and is considered negligent for not preventing your injuries.

For a Personal Injury Lawyer Baltimore these situations frequently arise in slips and falls on an owner’s piece of property or when a tenant or one of his guests is injured in a rental property. For a Personal Injury Lawyer Baltimore to hold the owner of a property liable, it is not sufficient to merely say that the injury took place on that property; Personal Injury Lawyer Baltimore must also prove that the owner owed you a duty in that you were some sort of patron or authorized guest and that the owner either knew or should have known of the dangerous or defective condition that caused the accident.

For a Personal Injury Lawyer Baltimore if the landlord or business owner has a defective condition or slippery area and is unaware of it, because he/she has not been notified and had no way of doing a reasonable inspection to discover the situation, he/she may not be liable, because he/she did not have enough notice to remedy the situation.

For example, if you are in a store and a customer spills a foreign substance on the floor prior to you walking in that area and nobody notifies the store owner, the owner of that building is not liable for your injuries even though it happened on those premises because he did not have proper notice and had no way of knowing about the slippery condition. On the other hand, if the substance had been there for a long period of time and there was sufficient time for the owner to have done reasonable inspections or for someone to have notified him, he may be liable even if he had no notice.

For a Personal Injury Lawyer Baltimore in typical landlord/tenant situations where the tenant lives in the property and doesn’t notify the landlord of the problem, he/she may not be able to file an action against the landlord because he/she failed to notify the landlord of the dangerous condition. Without adequate time and notice, the landlord or owner cannot be held accountable by a Personal Injury Lawyer Baltimore. If, however, the tenant notifies the landlord of the dangerous and defective condition and the landlord fails to properly fix the condition, the landlord may be held liable by a Personal Injury Lawyer Baltimore because he/she has had notice and still failed to do his/her duty.

Personal Injury Lawyer Baltimore Frequently Asked Questions II

What is strict liability or product liability?

For a Personal Injury Lawyer Baltimore if an accident is caused by a defective product, the manufacturer and the seller of the product may both be liable for the injury. For a Personal Injury Lawyer Baltimore defective products are everywhere, including cars, baby cribs, medicines, etc. In these particular cases you don’t normally have to prove negligence and may proceed on a theory of strict liability.

Defenses to your negligence action can destroy your cause of action. If a defendant in a slip and fall case or a products liability case or a landlord/tenant negligence case can prove that the plaintiff was in way contributory negligent or assumed the risk then that is an absolute defense to any claim that may be made. Maryland is a contributory negligence state, which means that in order for a plaintiff to prevail in a personal injury claim the plaintiff must be 100 percent in the right and must not contribute in any way to the accident. If the plaintiff contributes even 1 percent to an accident, the plaintiff loses and cannot recover anything. While this may seem very harsh, many defendants use this legal theory to disavow liability.

For instance, in a typical slip and fall on ice in front of a business, the landlord will prevail if he can show that the tenant saw the ice prior to walking on it but made a conscious decision to walk on the ice anyway. The landlord can then assert the defense of contributory negligence and/or assumption of risk and can successfully dodge liability even though he may have been negligent in not cleaning up the ice in the first place.

Personal Injury Lawyer Baltimore Frequently Asked Questions III

Proving slip and fall cases

The following are guidelines that will help your Personal Injury Lawyer Baltimore determine who is responsible in a typical slip, trip or fall case on property belonging to someone else. Thousands of people are injured each year in slip, trip or fall cases. Sometimes the owners of a property are responsible and other times they are not.

Personal Injury Lawyer Baltimore must remember it is a normal part of living for things to fall on or drip onto a floor and that someone who owns or occupies a property cannot always be responsible for accidents. Further, the property owner is not responsible where someone slips or trips on something that an ordinary person would expect to find there and would ordinarily see and/or avoid. We all have an obligation to watch where we were walking. In determining whether a property owner should have known of a defective condition when in fact they did not have actual knowledge of the condition you would have to look at the following factors:

• How long has the dangerous area been there? Was it there long enough that the owner should have known about it?
• Does the property owner have a regular procedure for examining, cleaning or repairing the premises? If so, what proof does the owner have of this regular maintenance? If you tripped over an object that was on the floor for a good reason, does there still exist a good reason to have the property on the floor or is there another place that the particular object could have been placed that would have been more safe without any greater inconvenience or expense to the property owner?
• Could a simple barrier have been created or a warning have been given to prevent people from slipping or tripping?
• Did the lighting in the particular area contribute to the accident?

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