How To Prove Fault in a Personal Injury Case

In this video, attorney Ted Spaulding explains what is needed to prove fault in a personal injury case. He reviews what elements will best help prove your story and get you favorable results. 

How to prove fault in a personal injury case. Keep watching this video to learn some of the techniques to prove fault.

Hi, I’m Ted Spaulding. I’m an Atlanta personal injury trial lawyer and the founder of Spaulding Injury Law: Atlanta Personal Injury & Car Accident Lawyer.

So the answer to this question is every case is different depending on what type of case we’re talking about, whether it’s a car accident; it’s a premises liability, which is your slip and falls, trip and falls; if it’s a trucking case or a wrongful death case. Obviously, those components are a little bit different. But there’s some core ways that, throughout the different types of cases, that you can prove fault. And this is a good topic for lay people to listen to in case you are injured by the negligence of another so you know what to start to gather. You can help your lawyer get further down the road to proving fault by knowing what to look for.

So a couple of those general categories. Number 1, first and foremost, a police report or an incident report. So in a motor vehicle accident, we’re talking about the motor vehicle crash report from the police officer that comes out and investigates the accident, determines who’s at fault. Great evidence, obviously. Right? The more difficult ones are your premises liability cases or, let’s say, an assault case or something like that. You may have to have an incident report. So, you know, you trip and fall somewhere at a big retail box store, they’re going to have a report the manager fills out about what happened. That’s one way to prove fault.

Another way is witnesses. So no matter what type of case we’re talking about, if there are any witnesses to the incident who can say, “Hey, here’s how it happened. I saw the whole thing,” that’s some of the best evidence you could have. These people don’t have a dog in the fight. They’re not hired by you. They’re not hired by the defense. These people just saw what happened. Great evidence.

Another one, video. If there’s any video car wrecks, there’s video everywhere nowadays, so we’re always out there looking at security camera footage at different places, see if it captured the car wreck. Slip and fall, trip and fall cases, again, at big box retail stores and things like that, they’re going to have security footage that probably has you…shows you falling. That is great evidence of exactly what happened.

Photographs is another one. So after a wreck, if you take photographs of the damage to the vehicles, that could be used to help prove fault. If it’s a slip and fall or a trip and fall, if you take a picture of the hazard, that can help prove fault. So pictures are a big thing. One type of picture that a lot of people forget are the injury photographs, so less direct evidence of fault, but it goes to help prove what the injuries were and therefore, oh, they must have injured this person, which, again, is part of the fault, the negligence part of it. Okay? So photographs is a big one.

The other area would be any other type of documentation. What do we mean by that? Well, in your car wreck cases or your motorcycle wreck cases, probably not going to be a ton else that is going to show you who’s at fault, right, beyond what we’ve already talked about. But when you’re talking a premises liability case, a product liability case, a wrongful death, there may be documents from, let’s say, the corporate defendant that they had a board meeting where they talked about the incident and they determined, on their own, that their employee was at fault. Well, getting that in discovery can help prove fault in your case. So, kind of, your general category of all other documents and bills that might be out there, that’d be another way to prove fault.

So these are just a couple of the areas of, in general, no matter what type of personal injury case you have, how to prove fault. If you’ve got any questions or concerns about your personal injury case or you have a case you would like for me to review, I’d be happy to answer any questions or review your claim or case and see if it’s something we might be able to handle. A couple of ways to get in contact with me, you can respond to this video with a comment, you can go to our website, spauldinginjurylaw.com, we have forms on there that you…