Wednesday, May 18, 2011

WHAT IS THE VALUE OF MY PERSONAL INJURY CASE? The insurance company says "no one is at fault".


Experienced Baltimore personal injury lawyers have heard this argued one more than one occasion. Whether it is phrased in terms of "act of god", "unavoidable accident" or some strain of "sudden incapacity of a driver", Baltimore personal injurylawyers  representing the insurance companies do argue to juries that although there was an accident, and although there were injures, no one should be held responsible. In order to recover for an automobile accident, the negligence of that at-fault driver must be what the law calls the "proximate cause" of the collision. [there is more material on proximate cause in other chapters of this volume]. The notion that some other mechanism –other than negligence- caused the accident lies at the core of all of these defenses. For example, the presence of ice on the roadway, it could be argued, is an unforeseeable  circumstance, making a collision between vehicles on that roadway inevitable, and something that could not be prevented. Or, "the drive of the other car had a heart attack, or a seizure". However, knowledgeable Baltimore personal injury lawyers know that a defendant claiming this type of incapacity has the burden of proving that there is no way they could have foreseen it coming. For example- a person suffering from a seizure disorder controlled by medication may have a reason to anticipate a seizure if they neglected to take that medication.

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