If you have suffered an injury that you believe is the fault of someone else, you may want to consider filing a personal injury lawsuit against the person who you believe responsible. If you've never done this before, you may be a bit perplexed as you begin researching lawyers, lawsuits, and the personal injury process. A lot of this confusion comes from industry-specific language that is not always intuitive to someone on the outside. Here are five terms you may come across -- and their meanings.
Plaintiff
The plaintiff is the person who is bringing the case against the other party. If you were injured and are filing a case against someone who injured you, then you are the plaintiff in that case.
Defendant
The defendant is the person you are filing a case against. This term comes from the fact that they will have to defend themselves against the lawsuit -- with the help of a lawyer, of course.
Negligence
The term negligence has a very specific meaning in personal injury law, and it's the concept upon which every personal injury case rests. In order to win a personal injury case, you must convince the judge that the other party was negligent towards you. In other words, they had a duty to provide you with something -- perhaps safety or freedom from harm -- and they neglected that duty. That neglect of duty can be an action or an inaction. For instance, maybe they did not clean up a puddle (a negligent inaction) or maybe they put a dangerous barrier in the middle of the parking lot (a negligent action).
Damages
The damages are the monetary costs of your injury. For example, your damages may include medical bills, wages you lost as a result of being unable to work, and wages lost due to an injury that will keep you from holding the same type of job in the future. Your personal injury attorney will help you tally up the total of your damages, and this is the amount you can sue the defendant for.
Gross Negligence
You may see this term when looking into the types of cases personal injury attorneys take. Gross negligence is when the defendant purposefully, rather than accidentally, harmed you. For example, if someone clearly saw you and drove straight at you with their car, that would be gross negligence. If you believe you are a victim of gross negligence, seek out an attorney, like Kenneth P Hicks, who takes this type of case, specifically.
Share17 March 2018
Hello, my name is Matthew. Welcome to my site. I am here to talk to you about accident and personal injury attorneys. When I was involved in a serious accident, I had to recover for months in the hospital. My finances suffered due to mounting medical bills and lost wages. I dealt with considerable pain through every phase of the healing process. I worked with an accident and personal injury attorney to obtain compensation for the repercussions of the accident. I created this site to help others find an attorney to work with so they too could acquire compensation following an accident.